The rollback of women’s rights is an integral feature of democratic decline. It is a recession indicator: where women’s rights contract, democracy is already in retreat. Rights secured over decades are being dismantled: reproductive protections, gender-based labour rights, civil and political freedoms. The terms of this dismantling vary by context, but the logic is consistent: women’s rights are actively contested, and the boundaries between private autonomy and public authority are continuously redrawn.
As gender equality recedes, the space in which women can participate, at home, in communities, and in political institutions, contracts. What happens to women who step into public life is not only about individual risk; it is a signal about whose presence is welcome in our democracies, and on what terms.
