Translating legal rights into lived equality: Reflections on International Women’s Day 2026 | Brookings

Each year, International Women’s Day invites us to reflect on progress while also confronting the challenges that continue to impede gender equality. This year’s theme—“Rights. Justice. Action.”—speaks to a daily reality for the majority of women and girls around the world: legal reforms and policy commitments often fail to transform their lived experiences. Despite improvements in global measures of legal equality between men and women, in nearly 70% of countries, women face greater barriers to accessing justice than men, a situation that worsens in the growing number of conflict-affected contexts. Girls and women continue to face increasing levels of gender-based violence, and women’s rights have been subject to the winds of political change as well as highly organized anti-gender movements in the U.S. and globally. In short, policy change on its own has not been enough.

Across the world, systems meant to protect or advance gender equality are too often designed around the resilience of girls, women, and their communities rather than shared responsibility. They rely on individuals to make up for structural weaknesses, whether that be survivors seeking justice, girls navigating discriminatory norms, or community leaders and organizations filling institutional gaps. As our recent research with girls across eight countries has shown, improved outcomes—whether that be defined as well-being, thriving, or justice—require shifting from a narrow focus on individual agency to engaging girls, boys, families, educators, communities, governments, and funders to transform the systems around them.

As we reflect on this year’s IWD theme, my colleagues, the Echidna Global Scholars working to promote gender equality in and through education in Uganda, Jamaica, India, and around the world, challenge us to focus on redesigning systems for justice. Advancing women’s rights and gender equality is about more than resilience. It requires intentional design and sustained commitment to transform norms, rebuild structures, distribute power, and ensure that hard-won rights translate into lasting and lived equality.