Author: S. Mona Sinha

S. Mona Sinha is the global executive director of Equality Now, an organization that campaigns across the globe for legal and systemic change to address violence and discrimination against women and girls. She is widely recognized as a decades-long champion of gender justice, having leveraged her corporate experience to launch, lead or advise over 90 mission-aligned organizations to create a gender-inclusive world. She is the Oscar-nominated executive producer of To Kill A Tiger and other documentaries. Creating inclusive communities is at the center of her strategic approach, which she believes is the key to unlocking sustainable growth. She is a fellow of the 2024 Public Voices on Advancing the Rights of Women and Girls with Equality Now and the OpEd Project.

After a Long Campaign, California Finally Banned Child Marriage. Survivors Made It Happen.

I grew up around women who were wed while they were still children. My grandmother was married at just 10 years old and my aunt at 16. At school, friends of mine married. I watched their schooling stop, pregnancies that came too soon, choices made for them rather than by them. Relatives would ask, gently but pointedly, when I intended to do the same, as though delaying it only put off something inevitable.

What haunted me then still haunts me now is how ordinary everyone around us made it seem.

That ordinariness is how child marriage has survived for so long in the United States. California has now banned it. On Sept. 30, Governor Gavin Newsom signed bill AB-1267, setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage with no exceptions.

The Erosion of Women’s Rights Is a Warning Sign for Democracies Everywhere

Over 30 years ago, world leaders came together in Beijing and made a promise: Gender equality would be a global standard, not a distant aspiration. This March, as the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women convenes for CSW70 under the theme of strengthening access to justice and eliminating discriminatory laws, that promise remains not only unfinished, but increasingly under coordinated assault.

Since 1999, Equality Now’s Words & Deeds reports have tracked laws and policies that discriminate against women and girls, documenting progress when legal reform has been achieved and holding governments accountable when words fail to translate into action.

Our new Words & Deeds update, Progress and Backlash: Accountability for the Rights of Women and Girls, shows that we are at a perilous moment of global regression in women’s rights. Across regions, protections once considered settled are being diluted, defunded and, in some cases, deliberately dismantled.

Oscar-Shortlisted Film ‘Belén’ Exposes the Injustice That Helped Transform Argentina’s Abortion Laws

Belén didn’t know she was pregnant until she miscarried in a hospital. She’d gone to the emergency room suffering excruciating abdominal pain. Instead of receiving care, she awoke from surgery handcuffed to her hospital bed and accused of having an illegal abortion.

This is the true story behind Belén, a powerful new Argentine film directed by, written by and starring Dolores Fonzi. It is based on the ordeal of a young woman from northern Argentina, chronicled in Ana Correa’s nonfiction book What Happened to Belén: The Unjust Imprisonment That Sparked a Women’s Rights Movement, the prologue of which was written by Margaret Atwood.

Despite a lack of evidence, Belén was charged with aggravated homicide and sentenced to eight years in prison.

After two years, Belén was freed, thanks to the legal work of activist and lawyer Soledad Deza and the sustained support of women’s organizations and women’s rights activists and movements, such as “Ni Una Menos” (Not One Less). Her case became a rallying cry for reproductive rights, with thousands taking to the streets under the banner #LibertadParaBelen (“Freedom for Belén”), paving the way for Argentina’s historic legalization of abortion in 2020.

Where There’s Fire, There Are Women Carrying Water

The girl I was in Kolkata would not recognize the woman I am today.

I was a girl who noticed everything: the way women’s voices dropped around men, too hot to argue; the way dupattas were carefully wrapped to conceal bare shoulders; the way hair was yanked into tight buns to spare the neck from sweat.

There was heat in the body too, a restlessness, an impatience, a dawning awareness of what it meant to grow into a girl in a world already lined with expectations. Summers were when I first learned to shrink myself.

Decades later, I find myself in a different kind of heat. Not from the sun, but from the headlines: the rage, the lies, the erasure. This is the heat of 2025: Trumpism returned, democracy under siege, rights dismantled. Roe is gone. Truth is a moving target. Rage simmers, thick enough to choke on.

In these moments, I return to those childhood summers. Not just for the discomfort, but for the clarity. Because in heat, everything sharpens. You see what survives. You see what wilts. And you learn how to move through the world without losing your shape.

Men, Your Moment to End Gender-Based Violence Is Now

One in three women globally experiences extreme violence, often inflicted by male partners. Recent tragedies underscore how pervasive this violence is. Ugandan Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei was brutally set aflame by her partner. Days earlier, the world was shocked by the brutal rape and murder of a young trainee doctor in India. The recent case in France of Dominique Pelicot who drugged, tortured and gang-raped his wife Gisele for over four decades, is horrifying.

Men, your moment is now. The world needs you to rise to the challenge of ending this violence.