The Good News on Women’s Rights

What are those advances, and how can we learn from them? And should more countries consider what is known as a feminist foreign policy? I spoke with Thompson, the founder and CEO of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, on the latest episode of FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

The persistence of gender inequality in countries and companies is well known. By some accounts, it would take more than a century for women to achieve true parity with men in a range of indicators, from leadership roles to opportunities. But as Lyric Thompson wrote in FP recently, progress isn’t linear—and there have indeed been real advances in countries around the world.

The persistence of gender inequality in countries and companies is well known. By some accounts, it would take more than a century for women to achieve true parity with men in a range of indicators, from leadership roles to opportunities. But as Lyric Thompson wrote in FP recently, progress isn’t linear—and there have indeed been real advances in countries around the world.

What are those advances, and how can we learn from them? And should more countries consider what is known as a feminist foreign policy? I spoke with Thompson, the founder and CEO of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, on the latest episode of FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: It can feel counterintuitive to say women’s rights are “winning,” to cite your piece. What are people missing here?

Lyric Thompson: Yes, I was surprised myself. This headline comes from a year of research that I conducted with my colleagues at the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, where we looked at every country around the world that has announced, or in some cases renounced, a feminist foreign policy. We do a global status update, and given the headlines going into this exercise, I really thought this was going to be the beginning of the end of the project, because the bad news feels overwhelming.

But we were shocked to find progress proliferating across the globe in every U.N. region—in a number of cases, as a direct response to setbacks. That is a really important story to tell, because otherwise our narrative of progress is incomplete. Women’s movements are learning from setbacks; they’re organizing, they’re coming back, and they’re effectively making progress in places that we just don’t hear about.