Three decades after her declaration in Beijing that “women’s rights are human rights,” Hillary Rodham Clinton is warning that those rights are under siege by the Trump administration and autocratic leaders abroad.
In a recent interview, Mrs. Clinton described a “coordinated, deliberate effort to dismantle the progress toward women’s equality.” With a new report on the state of gender equality tied to the anniversary of her famous 1995 speech, she hopes to revive her remarks as a rallying cry.
“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment for women across the world, who have benefited from the changes in laws, regulations and norms over the last 30 years, to realize that there are strong forces at work to try to turn the clocks back,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton, who served as secretary of state under President Barack Obama, linked her findings of a decline in women’s rights to a global resurgence in authoritarianism, noting that regression on women’s freedom is often an early sign of a weakened democracy.
The Trump administration is “following the authoritarian playbook,” she said, citing efforts by the government to pressure private companies to sideline critics, including late-night television hosts; to exert government control over law firms, universities and media outlets; and to fire lawyers at the Justice Department who refuse to prosecute officials the president considers his enemies.
“This is so un-American,” Mrs. Clinton said. “They are on a mission to undo the 250-year-old experiment of creating a country based on the idea that we are all created equal.”
The report, titled “Beijing+30: A Roadmap for Women’s Rights for the Next Thirty Years,” acknowledges that much progress has been made for women’s rights since 1995, when Mrs. Clinton, then the first lady, addressed the United Nations. Women have won legal rights and protections in over 100 countries. The gap between boys and girls in primary school has closed. And the maternal mortality rate declined substantially.
But in many areas, the rights of women are regressing. In 2024, nearly a quarter of nations saw a backlash on women’s rights and gender equality, according to the report, which cites examples of efforts to remove femicide from the penal code in Argentina, a push to overturn a ban on female genital mutilation in Gambia and the renewed total exclusion of women from public life in Afghanistan.
More broadly, the report highlights a focus by authoritarian leaders on “pronatalist” policies that give women incentives to stay home; a crackdown on female democracy activists; efforts to remove women’s rights from government bodies and international agreements; and a rollback of sexual and reproductive rights.
In the United States, President Trump eliminated the White House Gender Policy Council and the Office of Global Women’s Issues at the State Department, cut at least $3 billion in grants for programs that help women and girls and purged references to many women’s human rights abuses in the State Department’s annual Human Rights Reports.
Economically, women’s participation in the labor force has remained stagnant, according to the report. Women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn. They are still starkly underrepresented in corporate leadership positions, occupying only 11 percent of Fortune 500 C.E.O. positions. Globally, the report says, women lag behind men in access to the internet and mobile phones.
The report was released by the Women’s Initiative program at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics, which was co-founded by Mrs. Clinton in 2023. The Clinton Global Initiative plans to make the issue a major focus of its work in the future, starting at its annual meeting this week in New York City.
In an echo of her original speech, Mrs. Clinton argues in her foreword that “sidelining women’s health, education and political and economic participation harms not only women, but also entire nations.”
That address, delivered before Mrs. Clinton had truly defined herself on the national stage, has served as a thread she has woven throughout her career. Ten years ago, the anniversary was used as a focal point of her presidential campaign.
Now, she hopes it will fuel what she sees as a growing opposition movement to Mr. Trump and anti-democratic leaders worldwide.
“Voters, citizens,” she said, “are now seeing the danger that is being posed.” She added, “It did obviously take a while, and some people were more precious than others, but I think now the danger is widely seen and understood.”
With the United States cutting foreign aid, the report recommends a series of new ways to fund women’s organizations across the globe, suggests forming new coalitions that include the private sector and urges government leaders to enact gender quotas to increase representation in government.
In her interview, Mrs. Clinton offered a more direct solution for American women — and democracy.
“The effort to undermine the progress women have made is an issue in and of itself about the rights and opportunities of women and girls, but is a very clear signal about what else is in store for us if we don’t stand up, fight back, and vote these people out of office,” she said.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
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