Global

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

PUBLISHED 3/17/2026 by

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.

Cover Reveal and Spring 2026 Issue Sneak Peek: ICE Is ‘the Army of the Patriarchy’

PUBLISHED 3/17/2026 by

In early February, while the nation was still reeling from the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents, Loretta Ross and Jackson Katz—two feminist academics with decidedly different backgrounds and identities—discussed how U.S. federal agents became the enforcement arm of the nation’s racism and misogyny.

You’ll find this, and more, in the Spring 2026 issue of Ms.

Kristi Noem Is Out at DHS—But Women May Not Be Safer Under Her Replacement

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by

As frontline witnesses to the worst of humanity, physicians carry the heavy burden of moral distress—the anguish of seeing harm unfold and feeling powerless to stop it. This feeling has only grown with the rise of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in its current form. Its inhumanity under former DHS Security Kristi Noem’s leadership—reflected in the anxieties of our patients, many of whom are avoiding essential medical care out of fear—has us despairing with helplessness.

So, yes, many of us were excited to see Noem go.

The hope that swelled with Noem’s ousting vanished quickly with news of President Trump tapping Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) as her replacement, a former MMA fighter and co-sponsor of the SAVE America Act, which disproportionately targets women’s voting eligibility. Mullin holds extremist views on abortion, opposing even exceptions to save the mother’s life. Deeply disturbing is Mullin’s 2013 vote against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

While Noem’s firing is a step in the right direction, appointing a manosphere-adjacent fitness bro whose rhetoric of “protection” echoes the same ideology predicated on women’s forced subjugation—and whose political track record shows a distinct disdain for women’s lives—as her replacement is absolutely not the move.

‘¡Este País También Es Nuestro!’: La Herencia Duradera De Las Mujeres Hispanohablantes En La América Colonial

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by and

Siglos antes de la Revolución Americana, las mujeres hispanohablantes cruzaron océanos y desiertos para construir comunidades cuyo legado aún define a Estados Unidos.

Dado que el sentimiento antilatino coincide con el 250.º aniversario de la fundación de Estados Unidos, debemos recordar que mucho antes de la Revolución Americana, las mujeres hispanohablantes habitaban el territorio que se convertiría en Estados Unidos.

Al igual que sus homólogas protestantes inglesas de Nueva Inglaterra, las mujeres hispanohablantes fueron las madres fundadoras de nuestra nación. Su legado perdura a través de sus descendientes y de las muchas otras latinas que emigraron a Estados Unidos en los últimos 250 años. Ante la detención generalizada de mujeres hispanohablantes, es crucial recordar que Estados Unidos también ha sido su país durante mucho tiempo.

(Este ensayo es parte de la serie FEMINIST 250: Feministas fundadoras, que conmemora el 250 aniversario de Estados Unidos reclamando la revolución a través de las mujeres y las personas de género expansivo cuyas ideas, trabajo y resistencia dieron forma a la democracia estadounidense).

‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by and

Centuries before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women crossed oceans and deserts to build communities whose legacies still shape the United States.

As anti-Latino sentiment coincides with the 250th anniversary of the United States, we must remember that long before the American Revolution, Spanish-speaking women inhabited territory that would become the United States. 

Like their English Protestant counterparts in New England, Spanish-speaking women were founding mothers of our nation. Their legacies live on through their descendants and the many other Latinas who immigrated to the U.S. over the past 250 years. Faced with the widespread detention of Spanish-speaking women, it is crucial to remember that it has long been their country too.  

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

From ‘Every Man’ to the ‘Epstein Class’: Misogyny in Male Peer Culture Cuts Across Class Lines

PUBLISHED 3/7/2026 by

The rich men surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, and the working and middle-class men who were lured into Dominique Pelicot’s twisted fantasy, navigate the social world from very different sides of the class chasm.

But they share something in common, too: They’re all men who were socialized into a misogynous culture that dehumanizes women, turns them into sexual commodities and licenses men to mistreat them.

Misogynous exploitation is not rooted primarily in plutocratic privilege. The sense of unquestioned entitlement to women’s bodies that many observers have noted about “Epstein class” men is hardly confined to the wealthy.

Women’s History Month: Looking Back on How Far We’ve Come and the Hill That Lies Ahead

PUBLISHED 3/6/2026 by

Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment!

This week:
—Primary season marks few advances for women.
—Donald Trump’s endorsements were overwhelmingly male, and they mattered.
—LA Charter Commission recommends ranked-choice voting.
—German women oppose online hate speech.

… and more.

Women and the Taliban: Apartheid by Another Name

PUBLISHED 3/6/2026 by

Apartheid is the one Afrikaans word that the whole world knows. It is arguably South Africa’s greatest contribution to the development of international criminal law so far.

As a South African who lived under apartheid, I recognize the same architecture of systemic oppression in the Taliban’s rule over women in Afghanistan.

In the same way that Black people were excluded from spaces and services—“whites only” beaches and benches, for example, and entire suburbs—women in Afghanistan are excluded from public life. They are not permitted to travel outside their homes without a mahram, a close male relative. Authorities have instructed businesses and health clinics to refuse services to all women who are not accompanied by a mahram.

Sundance 2026: In Documentary ‘One in a Million,’ a Syrian Girl’s Life in Exile Reveals the Long Road After War

PUBLISHED 3/6/2026 by

Winner of Sundance’s Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category, as well as the Directing Award for filmmakers Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes, One in a Million lives up to its title. It homes in with a laser focus on the experiences of Israa, a Syrian girl whose family undertakes the perilous migration to Germany after the start of the Syrian civil war.

When the filmmakers first meet Israa in 2015, she is an inquisitive 11-year-old selling cigarettes on the street in Turkey while her family waits for the chance to cross the Mediterranean. The journey that follows—overcrowded rafts, long treks across multiple borders and nights spent sleeping on the street—contains harrowing moments, but it ultimately occupies only a sliver of the film’s larger story.

Once the family arrives in Germany, where the filmmakers check in with them over the next nine years, One in a Million reveals a far more complicated and intimate portrait of migration and acculturation.

As Israa grows from child to teenager to young adult, she navigates questions of identity, freedom and belonging, while her mother Nisreen becomes increasingly confident and independent in a country that offers opportunities she was denied in Syria. The result is a quietly riveting portrait of family life in transition, showing how the experience of displacement continues to reshape relationships, expectations and the possibilities of who each person might become.

(This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.)

The Epstein Files Reveal a System Built to Shield the Powerful

PUBLISHED 3/6/2026 by

Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were not carried out in isolation—they were enabled by a system that repeatedly narrowed investigations, shielded powerful figures and sidelined survivors.

Investigative journalist Julie K. Brown with the Miami Herald has extensively documented the mishandling of the Epstein case. Early reports and accusations were treated with skepticism; initial investigations were shut down; charges were narrowed; powerful actors were shielded; and even meaningful survivor notification of prosecutorial decisions was bypassed. Drawing on more than two decades working within the legal system on domestic violence and sexual assault cases, I see the Epstein files as a stark illustration of how institutions often fail those they are meant to protect.

The partial and selective release of the Epstein files only deepens these concerns. Survivors’ identifying information has been exposed while the names of powerful associates remain redacted. When victims are left vulnerable and power remains protected, accountability has not merely failed—it has been inverted.

This moment demands more than incremental disclosure: It requires full transparency, rigorous investigation and prosecution wherever the evidence leads, so that survivors’ courage is met with the justice they were promised.