Imagine having to ask your partner (or parent’s) explicit permission before opening a bank account. Or to apply for a credit card. Or to get a loan. This was life, leastways in North America, for women before Gloria Steinem.

Steinem died on 2 September 2026, at her home in New York City, her life’s work of championing equal treatment for women and men unfinished, by her own assessment. Steinem dedicated herself to the work of liberating women economically, legally and culturally, aspiring towards a world in which women and men enjoyed equal rights.  What’s not as well understood is that in the process, she also, however inadvertently, liberated men and boys from toxic definitions of what it means to be male.

Asked about her legacy in a 2022 interview with The New York Times, she said, “I feel proud, and I feel mad as hell. We are still dealing with the same issues.”

She’s right to be angry. Steinem died knowing women in states across America now have fewer rights than when she lived. From Idaho to Texas to Tennessee, nearly 63 million women live in states with abortion bans. That means a significantly higher risk of death from dangerous pregnancies and childbirth: pregnancies that state law forces them to carry. They continue to suffer a stubborn pay gap that keeps them on average, earning 81 cents to every dollar a man earns, regardless of sector (in Canada, the pay gap is 88 cents to the male dollar, according to Statistics Canada).

The Backlash She Lived to See

Most confounding of all is the cultural backlash. In the four decades since Steinem co-founded Ms. Magazine in 1972 with Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Pat Carbine and many others, the world has endured a roar of collective rage against the simple principle that second-wave feminism fought for: that men and women should enjoy equal rights.

That reaction is personified in the Anglo-American world by the Tate brothers; in the United States, by 77 million Americans electing a convicted rapist to the highest office in the land; and in Africa by the outsized popularity of influencers like Andrew Kibe.

This backlash isn’t just happening in North America. As a journalist and practitioner of media development across the world, I can say with great confidence that it is global. In Afghanistan, the most extreme expression of the backlash on women’s rights, women are not allowed to speak in public; girls are barred from school from grade 6 onwards. In Kenya, a 2025 study on femicide put the number of women killed that year, simply for their gender, at 220. That breaks down to a woman being killed roughly every day and a half. (The situation is not much better in Canada. The Canadian Women’s Foundation states a woman is killed every six days in this country, the overwhelming majority at the hands of someone they know.)

And then there’s labour force participation, which marched steadily up globally through the 1990s, only to plateau from 1994 onwards, and, in some countries, to stagnate or reverse. In Jordan, women get higher degrees at a level higher than men. But when it comes to participation in the formal, paid, labour force, women’s engagement is at around 14%, among the lowest globally according to the World Bank.  

What her Legacy Did for Men

What Steinem’s legacy means for women is well documented. Less intrinsically understood (but no less important) is the transformative, deeply positive impact of her work and legacy on the lives of men, boys, and communities worldwide. Including women’s perspectives and voices has improved family and community health, balanced out politics, and contributed to a more lasting and inclusive peace in countries from Liberia to South Sudan as they emerge from conflict. As Masai Ujiri once put it, adding women simply makes men better.........

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