Happy International Women’s Day!
This Saturday, March 8, we’ll take a moment to recognize the victories and gains made in the fight for the rights of women and girls around the world, and the challenges that have yet to be overcome.
We recently sat down with the director of Human Rights Watch’s Women’s Rights Division, Macarena Sáez, to talk about what went right over the last year, what went wrong, and what HRW plans to focus on in 2025.
Some countries made significant gains towards gender equality. Poland expanded its rape law to recognize non-consensual sex as rape. Last year, Mexico’s largest state decriminalized abortion, following a positive trend across the country. And in Chile, a new law seeks to combat gender-based violence.
But we’ve also seen attacks on the rights of women and girls, Sáez notes.
Amid conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti, women and girls are experiencing horrific acts of sexual violence, but survivors there have little support and services.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban is essentially erasing women from public life by denying them education, job opportunities, and even the ability to move freely. A recent episode of HRW’s podcast, Rights and Wrongs, features a former Afghan policewoman who, fearing for her life, fled Afghanistan when the Taliban took control.
And in the United States, we’re seeing women’s rights affected on multiple fronts. Women and girls lack abortion access across large swaths of the country, and attacks of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace will be particularly harmful for Black, Latina, and Indigenous women.
An important gain Sáez wants to see for women in 2025? Women’s participation in decision-making in the peace and security processes. “Without diverse perspectives on how a country is rebuilt, you miss some of the most complex problems because the people making decisions don’t experience them,” she says.
Read the whole interview
