Several recent international reports show that gender equality scores between women and men decline when evaluating support institutions, law enforcement, and associated public services. The World Bank confirms this in its latest analyses. This gap between formal law and effective implementation reshapes the priorities of field actors and donors.
Gap between legislation and enforcement: the true indicator of women’s rights
For several years, we have observed a legislative inflation favorable to gender equality. Parental leave, equal pay, protection against violence: the World Bank reports a wave of reforms between 2023 and 2025 in several economies. The problem lies downstream.
A country can adopt a law penalizing domestic violence without having a judicial network capable of enforcing it. Specialized courts are lacking, law enforcement is not trained in reporting procedures, and victims do not have access to legal aid. The text exists, but its impact remains marginal.
To measure a state’s real commitment, we recommend cross-referencing three levels: the normative framework, the budget allocated to support mechanisms, and data on actual recourse (filed complaints, prosecutions initiated, convictions pronounced). Platforms like femmesmonde.org document these disparities between countries and allow tracking the evolution of concrete indicators beyond official statements.
Funding for feminist organizations: a lever under pressure
The feminist associative ecosystem largely depends on international funding. Afghanistan illustrates the systemic risk of this dependence: according to UN organizations, a large majority of women-led organizations there have suffered funding cuts in recent years. The result is a collapse of local services (emergency shelter, legal assistance, reproductive health).
This phenomenon is not isolated. When a donor redirects its budget priorities, local structures lose their operational capacity within months. Dedicated support funds, such as the AFD’s Fund for Feminist Organizations, attempt to mitigate this fragility by prioritizing multi-year commitments.
Resilience criteria for a local organization
- Diversification of funding sources (at least three distinct donors) to limit exposure to unilateral withdrawal
- Strong community anchoring with a partially self-financed economic model (membership fees, training services, social microenterprise)
- Institutional advocacy capacity allowing access to national budgets and not just international cooperation funds
Without these three pillars, an organization remains structurally vulnerable to the political cycles of donor countries.
Women’s rights in business: beyond the equality index
Inclusion in business is not measured solely by a declarative score. In France, the professional equality index has pushed companies to publish their pay gaps, but it remains a tool for compliance rather than transformation.
The levers that produce measurable impact are more granular:
- Audit of internal promotion processes with gender-disaggregated data by hierarchical level, not just by socio-professional category
- Shared parental leave policy with identical pay maintenance for both parents, which reduces career bias related to maternity
- Mandatory training for managers on gender bias in performance evaluation, documented and followed annually
- Quantified representation goals in management committees, with a public timeline
The challenge for committed companies is to shift from a reporting logic to a results logic. A pay gap that stagnates from year to year despite a good index score signals a structural problem that the tool does not capture.
Documented setbacks: mapping areas of regression
The commitment to equality does not follow a linear trajectory. According to data reported by several observatories, about four out of ten countries experienced a setback on at least one women’s rights indicator in 2026. These regressions affect various areas: restriction of access to abortion, limitation of freedom of movement, exclusion from public space.
Afghanistan remains the extreme case, with a systematic dismantling of acquired rights: prohibition of access to secondary and higher education for girls, closure of women’s professional spaces, erasure of women from the public sphere. This setback is not merely symbolic; it destroys decades of investment in human capital.
Recent reforms to watch
In Europe, the United Kingdom introduced in 2026 guidance from the EHRC specifying that certain non-mixed public spaces must be organized according to biological sex. This regulatory evolution directly modifies access policies in public services and generates a legal debate on the articulation between women’s rights and the rights of transgender individuals.
In Africa, Sierra Leone has established an accountability framework linked to its gender equality law adopted in 2022, with an annual monitoring report. This post-adoption control mechanism is precisely what is lacking in most countries that have recently legislated.
The question is no longer whether a country has a legal arsenal favorable to women’s rights. It concerns the institutional capacity to transform these texts into tangible changes for women living under their jurisdiction.
