A decline in democracy and harmful content spread on social media platforms are helping to drive a backlash against feminism, and the growth of misogynistic and retrograde ideas about the roles of men and women and society.
The pushback against gender equality is one of the findings in a major report from UN Women, the UN agency for gender equality, on the progress made so far in advancing women's rights worldwide.
This latest version of the study, which is updated every five years, comes at a time of great uncertainty, as several donors announce major funding cuts, leading to the disruption of essential services for women worldwide.
The report measures the extent to which the aims of a groundbreaking women's rights accord adopted in Beijing in 1995. Around a quarter of countries surveyed note a backlash against feminism and gender equality.
However, it is not all bad news: there have been many encouraging signs of progress over the last thirty years, from legal protections for women, to services and support for survivors of domestic abuse and bans on gender-based discrimination in the workplace.
Ahead of the launch of the report, Laura Turquet, the deputy head of the research and data team at UN Women , and Lydia Alpizar, a Costa Rican feminist activist based in Mexico City, spoke to UN News about the reasons for this renewed attack against feminism and what it means for the state of gender relations.
Laura Turquet: What we're talking about is organised resistance to gains that have been made on gender equality, whether that's preventing the implementation of existing commitments, rolling them back or stopping new laws and policies.
Examples include the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States [a US Supreme Court decision that protected the right to abortion] and the decision by several European countries to pull out of the Istanbul Convention [a treaty on gender-based violence]. And elsewhere, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, we've seen a defunding of women's ministries, or their mandates are changed from focusing on gender equality to a broader focus on families and children, which waters down their ability to drive policies forward.
Another element is the targeting of women's rights defenders and activists, women in politics, journalists and trade unionists who dare put their heads above the parapet and speak out on gender equality.
Lydia Alpizar: There most common form of attack is harassment and defamation, including criminalization, building fabricated charges against women's human rights defenders, or even arbitrarily detaining them, turning them into political prisoners.
It can also lead to more lethal forms of violence, such as disappearances and killings. In Mexico and Central America, we have documented 35,000 attacks on and 200 killings of women human rights defenders since 2012,
