‘What’s next?’ Women-led movements fear for the future

They have come from all over the world for the Commission on the Status of Women, two weeks of discussions, talks and networking. At the opening session on Monday, Sima Bahous, the head of UN Women (the United Nations agency for gender equality), told them that “misogyny is on the rise” and, at a townhall convened by António Guterres on Tuesday, the UN Secretary-General said that a “furious backlash” threatens to “push progress into reverse.

UN News met some of the delegates to gauge the mood and find out how they are they are feeling about the backlash against feminism flagged by UN Women, and what the threat of massive funding cuts from some major donor countries could mean for their organisations, and the people they support.

‘We’re going to move backwards before we move go forward’

Grace Forrest is the founding director of Walk Free, Walk Free, an international human rights group focused on the eradication of modern slavery, which produces the Global Slavery Index, considered to be the world’s leading data set on measuring and understanding modern slavery.

We’re here because women and girls are disproportionately impacted by nearly every form of modern slavery, from forced marriage to forced labour, debt bondage and human trafficking.

Their vulnerability to modern slavery is rising and their rights risk being rolled back throughout the world, so we wanted to come to here to put modern slavery on the agenda, in the context of an authoritarian government in the United States which is trying to ban words such as race, gender and feminism. We won’t be silenced or erased.

Today, we’re seeing misogyny on full display, through social media and through world leaders not mincing their words and people electing leaders who disregard safety and the value of women in the public forum.

We’re extremely concerned by funding cuts from major donors. We’re hearing about frontline organisations, run by people who have survived debt bondage and forced labour, having to take loans to try and keep their organisations afloat. Some of the most effective frontline organisations are being hit hardest and fastest.

Advancing the rights of women and girls is actually quite a tall order right now and it’s a scary fact to face, that we’re actually just going to be hoping to not move backwards. And I think we are going to go backwards before we go forward.

This is a time for systems to step up and directly call out the need for funding on issues like modern slavery.

‘We are highly affected by budget cuts’

Moufeeda Haidar is the Senior Regional Programme Coordinator at Restless Development, a non-profit global agency that supports the collective power of young leaders. She was a Global Youth Fellow for Gender Equality in 2024.

I’m based in Lebanon, and I mainly work on a programme which tackles sexual and reproductive health and rights for young woman living with disabilities, women living with HIV, those who identify as LGBTQ, and displaced woman across nine countries, between Africa, Central America and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The backlash against feminism has always been there. Sometimes it’s very politicised and it’s used to the advantage of the patriarchy, so that women’s rights and gender rights attacked. There’s definitely a rising backlash in Lebanon and the MENA region.

The current political environment is not a surprise for us. We are already highly affected by budget cuts in the MENA region. Funds for youth programmes have been cut for years. In our latest State of Youth Civil Society report, 72 per cent of respondents said that they barely receive any funds for climate action projects.

We are very worried about how to plan. We work with grassroots organisations, women-led organisations and feminist movements and we have created networks in these countries and seen the amazing work that they have done throughout the years. We are wondering what’s next. How are we going to support this network?

‘It boggles the mind and leaves me speechless’

Linda Sestock is the president of the Canadian Federation of University Women, which awards university scholarships to women and promotes the participation of women in all aspects of emerging technology and leadership.

We’re extremely concerned, especially after seeing what happened with our neighbours to the south of us: we have noticed how alliances have shifted in the United States and we’re very fearful. We want to make sure that it doesn’t happen in Canada as well.

Most Canadians believe in the rights of our fellow women and that we’re going to be able to continue on the same trajectory that we’re on, but we need to be careful and we need to make sure that we don’t backslide.

We need to be hyper focused about ensuring that women are educated and that they’re entering the fields of technology, engineering, science and mathematics, because right now algorithms are slanted towards men and can be used against women.

We’re worried when we see that some words are not allowed anymore, such as diversity, equity and inclusion [a list of words banned or discouraged by the US administration has reportedly been drawn up and circulated]. We have a lot of professors in our organisation, and people are losing grants because they are being asked to remove words like female and gender. They are refusing and so they are losing funding, and we need to make sure that we continue to embrace diversity, equity and inclusion.

It boggles the mind and leaves me speechless.

These interviews have been edited for clarity and length