Women laborers take a break at an agriculture market, Ahmadabad, India, Nov. 23, 2016 (AP photo by Ajit Solanki).

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the status of women’s rights and gender equality in various countries around the globe. India’s minister for women, Maneka Gandhi, recently declared that the country’s rape problem was exaggerated, and that the Indian media’s overemphasis on rape was negatively affecting tourism. In an email interview, Nandita Bhatla, a senior technical specialist at the International Center for Research on Women, discussed women’s rights in India. WPR: What is the current status of women’s rights and gender equality in India? Nandita Bhatla: Achieving women’s rights and gender equality continues to […]

A Saudi woman casts her ballot at a polling center during municipal elections, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Dec. 12, 2015 (AP photo by Aya Batrawy).

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the status of women’s rights and gender equality in various countries around the globe. Earlier this month, the Shura Council, a formal advisory body to Saudi King Salman, refused to even look into the possibility of letting women in Saudi Arabia drive. That leaves Saudi Arabia as the only country in the world that forbids women from driving. In an email interview, Katherine Zoepf, a fellow at New America and author of “Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World,” discusses women’s […]

A protester holds a banner that reads in Spanish "we want them alive" during a demonstration against violence against women, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oct. 19, 2016 (AP photo Victor R. Caivano).

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the status of women’s rights and gender equality in various countries around the globe. Last month, tens of thousands of women marched in Buenos Aires to protest violence against women in Argentina, after several particularly brutal cases came to light there. In an email interview, Jennifer M. Piscopo, an assistant professor of politics at Occidental College and the Peggy Rockefeller visiting scholar at Harvard University, discusses women’s rights in Argentina. WPR: What is the current status of women’s rights and gender equality in Argentina? Jennifer M. Piscopo: Argentina […]

A woman walks past graffiti in Sidi Bouzid, where the protests that lit the Arab world began, Tunisia, Oct. 19, 2011 (AP photo by Amine Landoulsi).

When Tunisians overthrew dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, they kicked off a wave of popular uprisings throughout the Middle East and spurred a jubilant sense of unity at home. But for champions of women’s rights in the country, that jubilation was soon replaced by a sense of dread over what might happen to those rights as Islamist conservatism began to take hold. While Ben Ali’s two decades in power were marked by corruption, human rights abuses and tight restrictions on free speech and political opposition, his regime did preserve the secular foundations of Tunisia’s strong women’s rights legislation, […]

Saudi women journalists during a press conference by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 23, 2016 (AP photo by Jacquelyn Martin).

The status of women in traditional Muslim societies, particularly Saudi Arabia, has long been an awkward source of cultural and political tension between the West and the oil-rich monarchies of the Arab world. Women’s roles are gradually changing as these states modernize, but more disruptive social change could well occur within a generation, as larger cohorts of educated women succeed in challenging social norms. Gender issues have been at the margins of U.S. relations with the Arab world for decades, and the mantra inside Western bureaucracies more generally has been that each society changes at its own pace. But while […]