Close your eyes for a moment. Now imagine stepping back in time to an era when women in Western countries had no rights, no security, and no voice.

Now open your eyes again. In our own moment, millions of Afghan women—and in particular widows—live in just such a moment. This reality has never changed for them, and, in fact it has only worsened. Afghanistan remains one of the most repressive places in the world to be a woman: education is banned, employment is restricted, and even traveling alone is forbidden.

“The longstanding underrepresentation or exclusion of women in clinical trials and the continued need to understand sex as a biological variable have resulted in still knowing too little about how to effectively prevent, diagnose, and treat a range of health conditions in women,” said Dr. Carolyn M. Mazure, former Chair of the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research in her keynote address at a recent Wilson Center event: Bridging the Gap in Women’s Health Research. The event was held in partnership with EMD Serono, the healthcare business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, as the first-ever Women’s Health Research Summit at the Wilson Center.

This article originally appeared on Enheduanna, a blog of the Wilson Center’s Middle East Women’s Initiative.

Only a few years ago, the world celebrated the women-led revolution in Sudan that ousted the former dictator Omer El-Basher after 30 years in power. Women were fed up with his government. Those who used to live in the urban areas experienced the humiliating public order laws: they were arrested and flogged for wearing trousers or walking around with no headscarves.

In October 2024, women from countries across the globe converged on New York for the United Nations Security Council’s annual open debate on Women, Peace and Security (WPS).

In Nigeria, however, thousands of women and girls were sighing in despair. Many of them were thinking about where they might find their next meal. A humanitarian crisis in Nigeria’s northeast region remains critical, and people living there are in dire need of food, clothing and shelter.

In August 2013, Josephine Majani, a mother of three from Bungoma County in Kenya, endured a harrowing birth experience. Despite her repeated pleas for help during labor, the nurses in the hospital ignored her. She struggled to walk to the labor ward while in intense pain, but all of its beds were occupied. Majani was forced to give birth on the cold concrete floor. Subsequently, nurses there subjected her to verbal and physical abuse—even making her carry her placenta back to the labor ward.

Over the last four decades, contracting HIV has been transformed from a fatal diagnosis to a manageable chronic illness. Political will and financial commitments have reduced new HIV infections worldwide by 39 percent since 2010. However, much work still is needed to meet global targets of preventing new cases of HIV and reducing AIDS-related deaths. Marginalized communities, including women and girls, face countless barriers which hinder progress towards comprehensive HIV prevention across the planet.

Pronatalism, the push for women to have more children, has elbowed its way into prominence in public discourse. In the United States, cultural and institutional pressures on women to bear children are articulated in various ways, from negative portrayals of women who don’t consider having a child a viable choice for themselves, to a burgeoning Silicon Valley subculture that advocates having “tons of kids” to save the world, to policy proposals that would further restrict reproductive choice or limit the voting power of the childless. The stigmatization of people without children and the recent rise in contemporary pronatalism is a global phenomenon.