A/HRC/56/51 anti-gender discourses and attacks on women’s and girls’ rights appear to be “crisis management” strategies: they serve to maintain, assert or revive certain social hierarchies, which are at once gendered, classed and racialized, in the face of the systemic crisis of transnational neoliberal economics and neocolonial geopolitics, which have been thriving on the “depletion” of women and nature.21 18. In some contexts, the gender backlash has not been immediately evident. As noted in the responses to the Working Group’s questionnaire, in many cases, it takes subtle forms, such as impasses in the implementation of relevant policies, a lack of or reductions in budget allocations or the dismantling or defunding of gender-equality bodies.22 It can take forms that promote progress in one area but involve a hidden cost or disproportionate burden on women and girls in another. 19. The backlash has become evident in extreme manifestations of gender inequality that fail to generate a proportionate response from the global community. A devastating expression of the rollback of gender equality is gender apartheid, understood as inhumane acts committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic discrimination, oppression and domination by one group against another group or groups, based on gender, and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.23 The Working Group considers that the case of Afghanistan, and the predominantly muted State reaction, is a concerning example of gender backlash. The pattern of large-scale systematic violations of women’s and girls’ fundamental rights in Afghanistan by the discriminatory and misogynistic edicts, policies and harsh enforcement methods of the Taliban, all in the service of the political goals of an extremist regime, constitutes an institutionalized framework of apartheid based on gender, and merits an unequivocal response.24 B. Women’s and girls’ rights between progress and regressions 20. Over the past six years, the Working Group has strived to identify progress towards achieving gender equality and promising practices, in a global context marked by a mounting gender backlash. It has continued to document the main challenges to eliminating discrimination against women and girls in all their diversity. 21. There has been some progress, but gender equality is not nearly a reality. Even when legal and policy advancements are achieved, implementation gaps are often alarmingly wide, impeding substantive progress, and they do not benefit all women and girls equally. Thus, women and girls continue to face discrimination in all spheres of their lives, frequently starting within their families and communities, while the gender backlash undermines current achievements and prospects for further progress. 22. In the following sections of the present report, the Working Group outlines the progress and regressions identified in its thematic reports, which were devoted to the five themes that it identified as priorities in 2018, when it set out its vision for its second six-year mandate:25 women deprived of liberty;26 women’s human rights in the changing world of work;27 women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive health rights in crisis;28 girls’ and young women’s activism; 29 and feminist and human rights-based approaches to gendered inequalities of poverty.30 The sections are organized around four main areas – political and 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 6 See, for example, Jerker Edström, Alan Greig and Chloe Skinner, “Patriarchal (dis)orders: backlash as crisis management”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 49, No. 2 (2023). See also Conny Roggeband and Andrea Krizsán, “Democratic backsliding and the backlash against women’s rights: understanding the current challenges for feminist politics”, Discussion Paper No. 35 (UN-Women, 2020). See A/HRC/53/21 and A/HRC/WG.11/40/1. See A/HRC/53/21. A/HRC/38/46, paras. 73–81. A/HRC/41/33. A/HRC/44/51. A/HRC/47/38. A/HRC/50/25. A/HRC/53/39. GE.24-07559