This archive covers documented progress on women’s rights and well-being worldwide — from legal reforms and health advances to economic gains and shifts in policy. Stories here focus on what’s working, who’s driving change, and where meaningful progress is taking hold.
President Macron revealed his government’s plan to present a draft text to France’s highest administrative court by the end of the year, paving the way for constitutional protection of abortion rights by the end of the year.
The SWEDD+ project has the potential to directly benefit over 2 million vulnerable girls aged between 10 to 19 years old who are at risk of child marriage, early pregnancy, gender-based violence, and leaving school in Burkina Faso, Chad, Senegal, The Gambia, and Togo.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina have developed an AI model that can predict in real-time whether or not cancerous tissue has been fully removed during breast cancer surgery. The model performed as well as, or better than, human doctors.
A new study from Lund University in Sweden has found that using AI resulted in the detection of 20% more cancers compared with standard screening, without affecting false positives.
Admiral Lisa Franchetti’s nomination as the U.S. Navy’s top officer would make her the first woman ever to sit on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the body’s history. A 38-year veteran who commissioned in 1985, she’s already only the second woman to reach four-star admiral in the Navy’s nearly 250 years. Her path includes commanding two carrier strike groups and leading U.S. Naval Forces Korea — the kind of operational résumé that speaks for itself. Her nomination came alongside several other historic firsts at the Pentagon, signaling a real generational shift in who gets to lead. It’s a reminder that the long, patient work of opening doors at the very top of powerful institutions does, eventually, move forward.
The bills protect providers from discipline for providing legally protected reproductive and gender affirming health care services.
5 million businesses were founded in the U.S. in 2022. 47% of those new businesses were founded by women. Before the pandemic, just 29% of American entrepreneurs were women.
Japan’s first abortion pill won approval in 2023, and clinical trials there showed 93% of participants had a complete abortion within 24 hours using the two-pill combination. Until that vote, Japan had been one of the last developed nations offering only surgical options, including a method the World Health Organization calls obsolete. The ministry took the unusual step of opening a public comment period before deciding, drawing strong responses from doctors and advocates who had pushed for years. The approval is historic, though spousal consent requirements still shape who can actually access care. As reproductive rights contract in some countries and expand in others, Japan’s shift is a reminder that progress is uneven, hard-won, and worth celebrating wherever it lands.
Women voted at the Vatican’s Synod of Bishops for the first time in October 2023, after Pope Francis rewrote the rules to seat them as full participants. Five religious sisters joined five priests as voting representatives for religious orders, and Francis appointed 70 non-bishop members to the synod, asking that half be women. The meeting itself grew out of a two-year listening process that gathered the hopes of lay Catholics across dozens of countries — one of the largest such exercises in modern religious history. For an institution two thousand years old, even a measured shift like this one suggests something powerful: when a church commits to listening widely, the question of who gets to answer becomes harder to set aside.
New Zealand’s cabinet reached gender parity for the first time ever, with women and men now sharing the top table 10-10. The shift came when Prime Minister Chris Hipkins promoted Willow-Jean Prime, who holds the conservation and youth portfolios, bringing the number of Māori ministers in cabinet to a record six. Counting ministers outside cabinet too, women now outnumber men across the full ministerial ranks — a quieter milestone that may matter even more. It builds on 2020’s election of the most diverse parliament in the country’s history, including the highest share of female lawmakers in the OECD. For democracies still wrestling with who gets to govern, it’s a hopeful glimpse of what representative government can actually look like.
