Women Battle Autocratic Regimes To Preserve Their Rights

Women’s political and economic empowerment is now stalling or declining around the world, with Georgetown University’s Women, Peace, and Security Index showing the implementation of gender equality laws has slowed in recent years, as have gains in women’s educational attainment and representation in national parliaments, Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks reporting for the March-April 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Photo Insert: Understanding the relationship between sexism and democratic backsliding is vital for those who wish to fight back against both.

At the same time, intimate partner violence has increased, and Honduras, Mexico, and Turkey have seen significant increases in femicide. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these trends worldwide, forcing millions of women to leave the workforce and take on additional unpaid care, restricting their access to health care and education, and limiting their options for escaping abuse.

The assault on women’s rights has coincided with a broader assault on democracy. According to Freedom House and the Varieties of Democracy Project at the University of Gothenburg, the last 15 years have seen a sustained authoritarian resurgence. Relatively new democracies, such as Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey, have slid back into autocracy or are trending in that direction.

Countries that were considered partially authoritarian a decade ago, such as Russia, have become full-fledged autocracies. And in some of the world’s oldest democracies—France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States—the anti-democratic sentiment is rising in established political parties.

“It is not a coincidence that women’s equality is being rolled back at the same time that authoritarianism is on the rise. Political scientists have long noted that women’s civil rights and democracy go hand in hand, but they have been slower to recognize that the former is a precondition for the latter. Aspiring autocrats and patriarchal authoritarians have good reason to fear women’s political participation: when women participate in mass movements, those movements are both more likely to succeed and more likely to lead to more egalitarian democracy. In other words, fully free, politically active women are a threat to authoritarian and authoritarian-leaning leaders—and so those leaders have a strategic reason to be sexist,” Chenowith and Marks argued.

Understanding the relationship between sexism and democratic backsliding is vital for those who wish to fight back against both, they added.

“Established autocrats and right-wing nationalist leaders in contested democracies are united in their use of hierarchical gender relations to shore up nationalist, top-down, male-dominated rule. Having long fought against social hierarchies that consolidate power in the hands of the few, feminist movements are a powerful weapon against authoritarianism. Those who wish to reverse the global democratic decline cannot afford to ignore them,” the authors argued.

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