International Women’s Day (March 8) is an appropriate moment to take stock of the status of women and the girl child both globally and in the  extended South Asian region and this year the personal overlaps with the professional in an unintended manner, as one reviews the UN Report on Women’s Rights released on Friday (March 7).

As a recently minted grandfather,  blessed to welcome  three little girls into the family fold, and as a security analyst, the UN findings this year are cause for deep despondency. UN Secretary General António Guterres in his message for Women’s Day noted that “When women and girls can rise, we all thrive. Yet, instead of mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny.”

This year's UN report provides a 30-year review after the 1995  Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing. This conference led to the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action  deemed to be a landmark agreement  in striving for gender equality and women's empowerment.

Glass more empty than full

Three decades later, the glass apropos the status of women, alas,  is proverbially more empty than full. On the plus side it must be acknowledged that since 1995 countries across the world have enacted 1,531 legal reforms advancing gender equality;  maternal mortality has dropped by a third; more girl children are going to school and  women’s representation in parliaments has more than doubled. And as many as 87 nations were led by a woman at some point in their recent history.

But the last few years have seen a regression in the commitment to the 1995 Beijing agreement and the latest UN report notes that the basic rights of women and girls are facing unprecedented growing threats worldwide, from higher levels of discrimination to weaker legal protections, and less funding for programs and institutions which support and protect women.

Furthermore, the report revealed that in 2024, nearly a quarter of governments worldwide reported a backlash on women’s rights. An alarming statistic is that a woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by a family member or intimate partner.

The report also highlights the grim reality that in the past decade there has been a disturbing 50 per cent increase in the number of women and girls directly exposed to conflict.  And the price paid by women in the wars still festering in Ukraine, Russia,  Palestine and the regional conflicts in Africa is yet to be estimated.

World indifferent to Afghan women

The worst case scenario is in  war-ravaged Afghanistan where the Taliban is back in power and has imposed harsh restrictions on women and the girl child,  resulting in near erasure of their identity and physical presence in the public domain.

The world remains largely indifferent to the status of women – whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere and the much heralded Me Too movement of yesteryear is now a dead issue and on the backburner. The return of Donald Trump to the White House has seen a glorification of misogyny and the UN Secretary General has summed up the current global gender orientation in an accurate and pithy manner.

It merits recall that President Trump  in the world’s oldest democracy was found liable for sexual assault by a jury and despite his lewd  remarks about ‘grabbing’ women and worse he has  been emphatically  endorsed by one cross-section of the US electorate that voted for him.

Trump cabinet members and close aides subscribe to a similar  form of  abusive impunity  and misogyny and both the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and tech billionaire and close aide Elon Musk are case in point. Hegseth has a history of abusing women (his own mother accused him of this ) and former Musk employees have accused him of “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size.”

Sexual violence on the rise

Despite earnest rhetoric about safeguarding women’s rights, the world’s oldest democracy  India remains  indifferent to the safety and welfare of half its population – women and girls. Sexual violence and the incidence of rape is on the increase and what is cause for deep despondency is the manner in which state and society in India are accepting this as a kind of new normal. Women subjected to violence have received little or no  substantive justice  and very few cases of rape have led to swift prosecution.  

This trend came into deplorable  focus in February in Raipur. A  40-year-old man who allegedly indulged in brutal unnatural sex with his wife, which eventually led to her death, was  exonerated by the Chhattisgarh high court. Reason : the legal grounds are   that a man cannot be prosecuted for marital rape in India.

This interpretation of the law is totally against the letter  and spirit  of the 1995 Beijing agreement and what is even more disturbing is that there has been little or no protest at this development – neither in parliament nor in civil society.

Women’s rights remain suspended in a less than empathetic,  male-dominated eco-system and the grandparent in me is despondent – what kind of an ugly,  predatory world awaits  today’s little girls ?

(The writer is an Indian Navy veteran and Director, Society for Policy Studies, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal)