The promises made at Cairo and Beijing have been broken. These important conferences had established the critical importance of the human rights of diverse women, especially their rights to substantive equality, rights to sexual and reproductive health and to be free from gender-based violence. Yet despite pledges made three decades ago, global governance institutions, including the human rights mechanisms and UN agencies meant to protect health and rights, have been unable to stem the tidal onslaught of opposition to the gender equity agenda. Large swathes of the world’s population have been adversely affected by the failure to fulfil gender equality commitments and the retraction of support for reproductive and sexual rights, not only in the global discourse but also in national policies and health systems.
In many countries around the world, we find young people are deprived of comprehensive sexuality education and services, unless it is focused on abstinence. Gender-diverse people are being criminalized and denied their basic rights while sexual choices are straitjacketed into heterosexual monogamous relationships within patriarchal family structures. Across several regions, women are being boxed into maternalistic roles and denied the rights to make decisions concerning their own bodies or be liberated from patriarchal controls over their labour. The gendered burden of unpaid domestic care work is escalating with withdrawal of public services and social protection. Within health systems, an estimated 70% of the health workforce are women but they are clustered in the lower rungs, with community health workers forced into ‘volunteerism’ under unfair working conditions. Concurrently we find the increasing privatization of all sectors related to health and its social determinants, while powerful private actors shape health agendas through vertical interventions promoting technological solutions. It is imperative that we recognize this pervasive rejection of feminist agendas and sexual and reproductive health and rights as a critical political determinant of health.
Powerful transnational forces are insidiously corroding any global or national consensus that upholds gender equality or the rights of women and gender diverse people, as well as dismissing liberal values or progressive language to undermine the very foundation of democratic global governance and delegitimize human rights forums. The onslaught is being led by well-funded and trained NGOs, lobbyists, think-tanks and coalitions, backed by wealthy conservatives and illiberal regimes. Recent scholarship has shown that the key drivers of anti-gender backlash include theocratic organizations, neo-liberal economic forces, and right-wing political parties or regimes. Religious extremism of all faiths upholds the patriarchal family as paramount, rejecting individual rights, ‘choice’ and any kind of sexuality that is not related to reproduction. Globalized capital benefits enormously from gendered role divisions: its corporatized pro-wealth ambitions require deregulation and the rollback of public services and spending on social protection, thus compelling families to cope with the costs of social reproduction. Ethno-nationalist populist parties manipulate the crisis of masculinities caused by precarity and insecurity, fomenting the longing for a patriarchal past and normalizing hatred and aggression while trivializing gender-based violence. All these forces seem to be united in their determination to perpetuate the subordination of women and gender diverse people.
Illiberal geo-politics emerging in different corners of the world gain legitimacy from religious organizations and draw support from hyper-capitalist institutions, to the point where the borders are blurring between the public and the private. These ‘shape-shifters’ are colluding to disrupt the gender equity agenda, building coalitions of public and private forces that elude clear accountability mechanisms. The unexpected convergence among these disparate forces consolidates the backlash against gender equity and rejects the redistributive potential of social protection since economies and societies depend heavily on unpaid care work assigned to women, valued at almost $11 trillion globally in 2019. Religious and market forces meanwhile promote notions of love and sacrifice in relation to motherhood to make this palatable to women.
Researchers and civil society groups need to counter the ‘shape-shifting’ forces of gender backlash with the strategic recognition of the close alliances between the private, the ‘privatized public’ and the public actors, indicating a spectrum rather than a dichotomy. In order to do this effectively, we need dialogue across our ’silos’ of specialization to build common cause and mobilize public opinion. It is imperative to develop feasible policy arguments for applying a feminist political economy lens to centre the unpaid care economy, to call for enhanced public spending on social protection and basic services, as well as to ensure the protection of everyone’s right to health and its social determinants.
About the author
Jashodhara Dasgupta is an independent researcher based in India with over 30 years of experience on gender, public health and rights-based approaches. Jashodhara has been part of setting up four feminist organizations in India and is currently on the Board at SAHAYOG and a Convenor of the Feminist Policy Collective in India. She led the women’s health and rights organization SAHAYOG for 12 years and nurtured national and international civil society networks for advocacy around sexual and reproductive rights. She has published in a number of peer-reviewed journals and been part of several academic and government committees, including the first and second Lancet Commissions on the Political Determinants of Health at the University of Oslo.
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