Beijing + 30: Looking Back on Women’s Rights, Progress and Backlash

Over 11 unusually rainy, cold days in September 1995, around 17,000 delegates from 189 governments gathered in Beijing for the Fourth UN World Conference on Women. At the same time, more than 30,000 participants attended the conference’s NGO Forum for civil society in Huairou, an outlying Beijing suburb. On September 22 this year, the UN commemorates its 30th anniversary. How significant was Beijing for women around the world? To answer this question, I look back at the common history of the global women’s movement and the UN starting in the 1970s and offer reflections on progress for women framed by this history.

Facts on this blog draw on the UN Foundation newly launched “The United Nations and the Global Women’s Movement: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future,”—a comprehensive research review of the relationship of the UN and the global women’s movement over five decades (1970s-2020s), including archival research and structured interviews with women movement leaders.

1. A Common history: Beijing was the culmination of two decades of women’s advocacy at the UN

Beijing was not a stand-alone event but the culmination of three world conferences on women: a UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City in 1975, which marked the beginning of the UN Decade for Women, followed by a mid-decade conference held in Copenhagen in 1980, and an end-of-the-decade conference held in Nairobi in 1985. A decade later, Beijing closed this series of UN world women’s conferences, attracting the largest number of participants of all.

Each conference achieved unique gains that paved the way for the success of the 1995 Beijing conference. Beijing was front-page news and a political victory for the global women’s movement. Together with the earlier conferences, it helped to boost women’s political participation at the national level. Yet, many of the other calls for action from the conference, outlined in a comprehensive document, the Platform for Action, adopted by 189 countries, remained largely aspirational.

After Beijing, the momentum to advance a global women’s agenda through the unique vehicles of UN conferences slowed down. The next world event, 25 years after Beijing, the Generation Equality Forum, which brought together government, civil society, and private sector actors under one tent, was delayed due to the COVID pandemic and took place mostly virtually in 2021. It generated 1,000 voluntary, non-binding commitments worth over USD 40 billion, much like earlier world conferences with also voluntary, non-binding plans of action. While neither meeting structure ensured accountability, responsibility for acting has been likely further diffused by the multistakeholder nature of the forum as compared to the intergovernmental nature of world conferences.

2. Reflections from a bird’s-eye view of five decades (1970s to 2020s)

The women’s movement is a global movement. This wave of the movement grew organically and spread around the world in the 1960s -1970s, it was not ‘exported’ from the West to developing countries as many in the international community long argued. The UN conferences on women dispel this myth, highlighting the leadership of women from the Global South in shaping agendas in all conferences.

Progress on women’s rights and gender equality has not followed a straight line. Framed by the UN conferences, it has ebbed and flowed between advances and setbacks. Each decade has brought both progress and retrenchment, though overall there have been real gains in women’s lives. Gains have been most visible in measures of girls’ and women’s wellbeing, education, and health, as well as in economic opportunities and political participation, but they have not been across the board. It remains difficult to assess if gender-based violence and women, peace, and security have improved or gotten worse, partly due to the lack of robust baseline measures. Women facing multiple disadvantages because of gender, poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, migration, and LGBTQ status have advanced far less than other women but again, it is hard to assess their progress because of lack of robust granular data on their condition.

The political and development contexts frame agendas and the pace of progress for women. They have deeply influenced how much space the UN creates for women’s issues, whether it sponsors women’s conferences, and how successful intergovernmental negotiations can be. Both the early 1970s and the early 1990s stand out as comparatively more harmonious times for the international community, with a focus on fighting poverty and a fairer global economic order in the 1970s, and expansive development agendas and political alliances in the 1990s. These periods saw the emergence of the modern global women’s movement in the early 1970s and its high point at the UN Beijing conference in 1995.

Backlash is the underside of progress, and it has only become stronger over time. The UN conferences helped energize a global women’s movement and, in turn, global backlash. This backlash first emerged in the early 1980s, fueled by rising religious fundamentalism, and became increasingly organized and powerful after the Beijing conference in 1995. New alliances formed across fundamentalist religions and authoritarian governments on the left and the right, launching concerted attacks on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights. Backlash, though, can also trigger a stronger response from women’s advocates and encourage alliances that otherwise would not have happened. A good example came at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, where family planning and feminist advocates joined forces to ensure adoption of a landmark program of action. This program transformed global thinking on population, shifting the focus from demographic targets to sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Same concepts, different terminologies over time. The review shows that ideas and concepts, now seen as recent, such as ‘gender data’ and ‘intersectionality,’ are deeply rooted in the past and are core to gender equality objectives. They were at the heart of the deliberations in Mexico City in 1975, carried forward in the three other conferences and have reemerged with a new name. The Mexico City conference, for instance, highlighted the failure of official statistics to measure women’s unpaid work and the realities of rural indigenous women experiencing multiple disadvantages.

Progress in action has lagged over progress in rhetoric. Ideas have evolved faster than their implementation, as shown by the still mostly aspirational goals of the Beijing Platform for Action. This is not surprising since successful implementation requires financial and technical resources, along with strong accountability, all in short supply for gender equality objectives globally.

Lastly, women’s issues have rarely been a priority in mainstream development agencies: The UN Decade for Women was under-resourced, reflecting its peripheral standing within both the UN system and governments. A telling example: the budget of the UN World Conference on Population in Bucharest in 1974 was three times greater than that of the UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City a year later, reflecting an inadequate allocation of resources. This pattern continued, and even in the early 2000s, after the success of Beijing and after the intergovernmental agreements to the Beijing Platform for Action were made, governments and development agencies still failed to allocate sufficient resources to gender equality goals.

3. Conclusion

The two decades of work that culminated with the 1995 Beijing Conference defined a global agenda to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, helped grow and energize a worldwide women’s movement, and helped fuel progress for women and girls. The UN world women’s conferences also attracted needed, although insufficient, resources for this work. This global agenda, however, remains unfinished and faces strong headwinds. UN consensus declarations and plans of action are ‘soft law’, since, without legal enforcement mechanisms, they rely on goodwill and rigorous monitoring. As backlash against gender equality intensifies, history suggests that there is hope that it will also spark stronger advocacy coalitions for picking up progress for women and girls. For this to happen, funding for women’s rights organizations, severely cut in recent years, needs to be restored. Much more robust monitoring and accountability mechanisms at national and international levels should also help, but these mechanisms require governments and international agencies to commit to and invest meaningful resources in gender data, evidence-based policymaking, and results measurement.

This post was originally published on September 22, 2025, on the Center for Global Development’s blog and can be accessed here.

Mayra Buvinic, an internationally recognized expert on gender and development and social development, is a senior fellow emeritus at the Center for Global Development and a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation. Previously, she was Director for Gender and Development at the World Bank.  She also worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where she headed the Social Development Division and was a founding member and President of the International Center for Research on Women.  She has a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.