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We may have come a long way when it comes to women’s rights, but sadly, there’s still a considerable way to go. When you can’t really point to a country on the world map where women are safe, free and equal to men, there’s an issue. When one woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by their partner or family member, there’s an issue. And when rights and freedoms are being reversed in several nations (including the rollback of abortion rights in the US and the threat of reversing the ban on female genital mutilation in Gambia), there’s an issue.

In even more bleak news, no country achieved gender equality in 2024. One in three countries have made no progress since 2015, and the situation for women even deteriorated in 18 countries, including Venezuela, Afghanistan and South Africa. At the current rate of progress, it’ll take another 131 years to achieve gender equality worldwide. Yes, over a century.

For International Women’s Day, the 2025 theme is ‘Accelerate Action’, which focuses on the importance of taking swift and decisive steps to achieve gender equality. And equality and liberation can only be achieved if the systemic barriers and biases that women face around the world are known, understood and tackled. It’s why it’s vital that we acknowledge and recognise the events of the last year when it comes to women’s rights.

And in the last year, women’s rights and freedoms have been further threatened and restricted. Here, we investigate just some of the main changes and events that have shaped the lives of women around the world in 2024.

Afghanistan: Taliban imposes stricter rules on women

The Taliban’s enforcement of what has become a gender apartheid in Afghanistan began years ago. The US troop withdrawal reignited the international debate around Afghanistan and women’s rights, and put it centre stage. The instability caused by this decision opened the door for the Taliban to take back control of Afghanistan in August 2021 – promising at the time that women’s rights would be safe. Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be far from the truth. But Afghan women and the rollback of their rights have largely disappeared from international conversations.

In 2024, the Taliban ruled that women were forbidden from looking directly at a man who isn’t their husband or blood relative; they were also banned from reading, singing or speaking in public in a so-called bid to discourage vice and promote virtue.

Over the past few months, many women have said that they’ve been targeted by Taliban officials and detained under anti-begging laws passed this year. Because of women’s inability to work or find paid work, many women have no other option but to beg for money and food. While in prison, women have claimed they were subjected to sexual abuse, torture and forced labour.

Iran: women continue to fight against a repressive state

Two years on from the death of Mahsa Amini, the Iranian government has escalated its assault on human rights – and particularly women’s rights – waging a ‘war on women and girls’ through its Noor plan (implemented in April 2024 onwards), an increasingly violent crackdown on the compulsory veiling laws.

Since the Noor plan, there has been a visible increase in security patrols on foot, motorbikes, cars and police vans in public spaces to enforce the veiling laws. The crackdown on women’s rights has also included dangerous car chases to stop women drivers on the road, mass confiscation of their vehicles, imprisonment, flogging and other cruel punishments.

In July 2024, agents from Iran’s police force fired lethal ammunition at a car that 31-year-old Arezou Badri was travelling in, leaving her severely injured. According to media reports, the agents were seeking to confiscate the car as part of enforcing the veiling laws.

India: sexual violence continues to be prevalent

Sexual violence is rampant in India, where an average of 90 rapes were reported every day in 2022. The country has a dark reputation as one of the most dangerous places in the world for women, and the issue of male violence against women and girls has been ongoing in India since a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern, known as Nirbhaya, was brutally gang-raped and murdered in 2012. Four men were hanged for the rape, which triggered nationwide protests at the time.

A new case in Kolkata brought the issue of gender-based and sexual violence to the forefront once again. On 9 August 2024, a 31-year-old trainee doctor was found dead in a seminar room in the Kolkata hospital where she worked. Local news reports said she’d fallen asleep in a classroom after a 36-hour shift, as there was no designated rest area for staff members. However, the autopsy showed she had suffered severe injuries and that her body showed signs of brutal physical and sexual assault.

In the weeks following the Kolkata case, ‘reclaim the night’-style protests broke out in several states across India, demanding better security and protections for women in the workplace.

South Korea (and beyond): the rise of the 4B movement

In South Korea, a growing number of young women are rejecting gender roles and societal expectations of marriage, motherhood and heterosexual relationships – known as the ‘4B movement’ or the ‘4 nos’.

The ‘B’ translates to the Korean word bi (비/非), meaning ‘no’, representing the movement’s four principles: no marriage, no childbirth, no heterosexual dating and no sex. By refusing to marry, have children or engage in sexual relationships with men, the women involved in the 4B movement are protesting the confines of the patriarchy as well as redefining their lives outside of traditional gender roles.

For young women in South Korea, economic insecurity is compounded by structural gender inequality and the country consistently ranks as one of the worst in the world for the gender pay gap. A 2018 women’s rights rally in Seoul lasted 33 hours as one woman after another took to the stage to relate their experiences of gender-based violence.

The re-election of Donald Trump in the US has seen the 4B movement gain more momentum on a global level, particularly in the US. Trump’s presidency is likely to once again bolster so-called anti-gender ideology as well as roll back important rights for already marginalised communities.

Even though Trump hasn’t committed to a federal ban on abortion, it was his previous administration that paved the way for Roe v Wade (key legislation that enshrined the right to abortion in US law) to be overturned by the US supreme court in June 2022. The surge of interest in the 4B movement from American women highlights the shared anger and frustration of what many will see Trump’s re-election as a further rollback of women’s rights.

France: the case of Gisèle Pelicot

It’s the trial that shocked the world and gets more disturbing with each detail that emerges: a French man stands accused of drugging and raping his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, 72, and inviting up to 90 men to do the same over a period of more than a decade.

Gisèle had waived her right to anonymity during the trial, a brave and unusual decision that her legal team explained would shift ‘shame’ back to the accused rapists, rather than the victim. Her courageous decision to waive anonymity also meant that unsettling details about the case have been made public and that videos of the alleged rapes were played in an open court.

When she took the stand during the trial, Gisèle told the court she wanted women who have been raped to know that “it’s not for us to have shame – it’s for them”. She said she wanted to lift the shame felt by rape victims. “I wanted all woman victims of rape – not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels – I want those women to say: Mrs Pelicot did it; we can do it too.”

This case has also highlighted the issues with consent laws in France. The French law currently defines rape as “any act of sexual penetration of any kind whatsoever, or any oral-genital act committed … by violence, coercion, threat or surprise”. The legal teams for some of the defendants have built their cases around this definition – specifically, that the need to seek each party’s consent is not explicitly mentioned in the legal definition of rape. But Gisèle’s trial reignited the momentum for campaigners pushing for the legal definition to be reformed.

Iraq: changes to the age of consent laws

In a regression of women’s rights, Iraq passed new legislation laws to allow men to marry girls as young as nine and strip women of rights and freedoms around divorce, childcare and inheritance. Women’s rights campaigners had said it could effectively legalise child rape in Iraq.

The country’s ruling conservative Shia Muslim parties voted through amendments to Law 188, which was passed by a more progressive government in 1959. A bloc of 25 female MPs in parliament tried to stop the draft law from being put to a second vote but faced strong opposition and it passed in January 2025.

Gaza: amid a conflict, women are experiencing a healthcare crisis

War and conflict have continued to inflict horrific and brutal violence on countries like Palestine, but these conflicts also harm women in specific ways.

Gaza has rapidly become one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a woman or girl. An estimated 50,000 women in Gaza are pregnant and the United Nations is estimating that more than 180 births are taking place every day within a collapsed healthcare system. Nearly 84% of health facility buildings have been destroyed or damaged, and those still working lack medicines, ambulances, basic life-saving treatment, electricity and water.

Women are giving birth in some of the worst conditions imaginable, struggling to feed and clothe their children, and many women have resorted to taking period-delaying pills or using tent scraps for their periods due to the unhygienic circumstances they’re now living in. An estimated 68% of pregnant women in the territory surveyed by UN Women have experienced urinary tract infections, anaemia, hypertensive disorders and vaginal bleeding.

Sudan: women and girls are facing mass sexual violence

In Sudan, the conflict has resulted in the largest internal displacement crisis in the world since the Syrian civil war in 2011. According to a recent UN Women report, the ongoing violence has “exacerbated the risks faced by women and girls, with rising reports of conflict-related sexual violence, sexual exploitation and abuse”. The nearly 5.8 million internally displaced women and girls are particularly vulnerable, with “many cases of abuse going unreported due to a lack of adequate support and fears of stigma and retribution.”

In a Sky News eyewitness report, the sheer scale and horror of this sexual violence is evidenced. The Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA) has confirmed 29 cases of gang rape in Al Jazira’s towns since 2021. There are reports of militias kidnapping, beating and raping women and girls while their male relatives are in the next room.

And because of the stigma and shame attached to rape and sexual assault in Sudanese society, cases of rape-related suicide are on the increase.

UK: a widening gender pay gap

The Fawcett Society found that the gender pay gap widened in 2024, with the mean full-time pay gap standing at 11.3% – up from 10.7% in 2023. Across the world, women are paid less than men, with the gender pay gap estimated at around 20% globally.

The widening gender pay gap means that, on average, every month working women take home £631 less than men – up from £574 per month last year. Last year, Equal Pay Day landed on 20 November; for women from marginalised backgrounds, this day was even earlier in the year.

Before she took office as the first female chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves set a goal of closing the gender pay gap during her time in the role. The Fawcett Society welcomed Reeves’s commitment to closing the pay gap for good, but to see genuine progress, action is urgently needed.

In more uplifting news, however, the UK 2024 election saw increased female representation in politics as women now have a greater presence in the House of Commons with 263 female MPs (of a total 650 MPs) voted into power – up from 220 in the previous general election in 2019.

Some wins for reproductive rights around the world

Even though some nations are curbing and restricting the reproductive rights of women, there was some light in the darkness in 2024. In France, congress voted to enshrine abortion as a guaranteed freedom in the French constitution. Additionally, the Mexican supreme court ruled that its congress must get rid of federal criminal penalties for abortion – meaning that all federal health facilities should provide abortion care.

In Sierra Leone, child marriage was finally banned last June. The Prohibition of Child Marriage Bill 2024 criminalises marriage for anyone under the age of 18 and aims to protect girls from this practice.

Celebrating the small wins is hugely important, especially when it comes to holding onto the hope needed to continue the fight for gender equality, but what’s more important is ensuring that the experiences of all women are firmly on the world stage. While some of the regression of women’s freedoms can be put down to populist and misogynistic leaders and unstable economies, the curbing of women’s rights doesn’t always get the attention and energy it deserves. It cannot be just something that is mentioned on specific days or months of the year by global leaders and public figures, but a struggle that should be amplified all year round.

Images: Getty