IWD: No country has achieved gender equality — UN
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Not a single country in the world has achieved gender equality, the United Nations has declared.
The UN warned that at the current pace of progress, it could take hundreds of years before women and girls enjoy the same rights and protections as men.
The declaration was made in an X post by the UN on Sunday to mark International Women’s Day 2026, underscoring what the organisation described as an urgent and widening justice gap facing women and girls across the globe.
“It’s 2026, and as of yet, no country has achieved gender equality. At the current rate of progress, it could take hundreds of years for women and girls to have the same rights and protections as men. Sunday is International Women’s Day,” the post read.
The warning is backed by a UN report titled Ensuring and Strengthening Access to Justice for All Women and Girls, which found that women currently hold just 64 per cent of the legal rights that men enjoy globally.
The report concludes that despite decades of advocacy and incremental progress, women and girls remain unequal to men under the law in every nation on earth.
The findings paint a troubling picture of a world where legal frameworks are being reshaped not to advance women’s rights, but to erode them.
According to the report, laws are increasingly being used to restrict women’s freedoms, silence their voices, and allow abuse to go unpunished, leaving them exposed to injustice and impunity as resistance to gender equality intensifies globally.
The statistics contained in the report are stark. More than half of the world’s countries do not have rape laws grounded in the principle of consent, with the report noting that about 54 per cent of countries lack a consent-based definition of rape.
Nearly three in four nations still legally permit girls to be forced into marriage, cutting short their childhoods, education, and future prospects. Additionally, 44 per cent of countries have no laws guaranteeing equal pay for work of equal value.
“The reality is stark. In more than half of the world’s countries, rape laws are not based on consent,” the report states, adding that the very systems designed to protect women and girls are failing them.
The 2026 International Women’s Day, observed on Sunday, centres on the urgent need to close this justice gap, shining a spotlight on the systemic inequalities embedded in legal and judicial structures worldwide.
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