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.

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.