By: Colum Lynch and Elissa Miolene

Featuring: Jessica Stern

The Trump administration renewed its campaign to limit the global expansion of human and economic rights for women and girls, opposing United Nations proposals to create a reparations fund for female victims of violence and to regulate artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies that can potentially fuel misinformation and hate speech targeting women and girls, according to internal notes of the talks obtained by Devex.

The U.S. initiative is playing out in negotiations over an outcome document that governments will consider at the Commission on the Status of Women, or CSW, at U.N. headquarters from March 9 to March 19. The document reflects on previous gains in the pursuit of women’s rights and provides recommendations to governments on what they can do to advance the cause of women.

U.S. diplomats had initially abstained from participation in the early stages of the talks, before reentering the negotiations last week with a laundry list of more than 90 amendments and comments to the draft outcome document. The Trump administration views the process as an unwelcome intrusion of U.S. sovereignty, which maintains that the U.N. has no business imposing its values on member states.

The U.S. delegation appeared to have gained little ground in securing support for the vast majority of its amendments, including a request to nix language underscoring the need to slow climate change and asserting the universal right to development.

“The Commission reaffirms that the promotion and protection of, and respect for, the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all women, including the right to development, which are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated, are crucial for the full, equal and meaningful participation of women and girls,” according to a draft text of the outcome document.

On Thursday, the U.S. appeared to be pursuing a fresh diplomatic stance: urging U.N. member states to support a shorter, pared-back declaration that avoids debate over any language that the current administration and some of its conservative allies at the U.N. oppose.

During a closed-door meeting, the U.S. delegation pressed other governments to remove provisions from the draft document that it considers “controversial social issues” in order to reach consensus by the opening of the CSW session on Monday, according to a copy of the U.S. statement reviewed by Devex. In exchange, the U.S. vowed to drop its red lines.

“Issues that are controversial and not internationally recognized human rights should be debated politically in countries,” the U.S. delegation said in a statement, which was shared with Devex. “They should not be imposed in UN documents.”

“Usurping member states’ domestic prerogatives on such issues increases the democratic deficit of this organization and turns international cooperation into a new form of colonialism,” the U.S. delegation added. “We urge delegations to ask the facilitators to avoid controversial issues in order to ensure an outcome.”

The U.S. noted that there remain “several areas of disagreement for many delegations that would work against the purpose of reaching a consensus outcome.” The U.S. encouraged other delegations to drop “their red lines so that they may be removed from Agreed Conclusions, which the United States has done.”

For critics, the U.S. action is part of a wider diplomatic campaign to dismantle the key foundations of international cooperation, having recently withdrawn from 31 U.N. offices and departments, including agencies devoted to the advancement of women such as UN Women and the U.N. Population Fund.

“This is the way the U.S. is showing up in multilateral spaces, and it really reflects this administration’s approach to the U.N. and multilateralism writ large,” said Jen Rauch, the global advocacy officer at the reproductive health organization Fòs Feminista. “This administration is trying to delegitimize the U.N. by totally invisibilizing what their behavior actually is.”

The Commission on the Status of Women was established in 1946 after the close of the Second World War to advance rights for women, holding its first session in Lake Success, New York, in February 1947. Shortly after its founding, CSW was championed by then-first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a powerful advocate for women’s equality, empowerment, and participation in politics.

In the years since, CSW has swelled to become the largest conference focused on gender equality worldwide. Every year, delegates spar over the outcome document — and every year, thousands of activists, civil society organizations, and U.N. reps host a slew of side events across Turtle Bay. The intergovernmental negotiations are being managed by representatives from Liechtenstein and Rwanda, who are leading efforts to forge consensus among the commission’s 45 member states.

This year, CSW is centered on women’s access to justice, with a recent report released by UN Women noting that globally, women and girls have just 64% of the legal rights of men. It’s a topic which, according to the latest draft obtained by Devex, is central to the outcome document, despite reservations on certain fronts by the African Group, Argentina, India, Iraq, Russia, and the United States.

Still, CSW is more than negotiation on an outcome document. The tensions between countries will also play out through side events, with countries such as Spain promoting its integration of feminism into its national foreign policy strategy, and those such as Burundi pushing the idea that motherhood should be a global priority.

For the U.S., that appears to mean hosting a number of events not at CSW, but at a separate gathering entirely: the Conference on the State of Women and Family. The two-day event, which takes place on March 11 and 12, is steered by conservative advocacy organizations, anti-abortion groups, and nonprofits focused on promoting “traditional family values,” a phrase typically used to describe a nuclear family with a breadwinning father, homemaking mother, and their biological children. The U.S. will be hosting events at that conference, CSWF, on gender ideology, “the protective power of parental rights,” and digital safety.

The effort serves as a replay of Washington’s diplomatic effort last year to scale back the promotion of new rights, not only for women, but for other groups, including representative members of the LGBTQI community.

Washington broadly opposes policies that others say are aimed at giving a leg up to underrepresented or disadvantaged groups of people, while promoting greater access to faith-based organizations in U.N. fora. The country — as evidenced by the side events the U.S. is hosting at CSW — is more focused on promoting traditional family values and motherhood while combating “gender ideology,” a term used by conservative groups to describe transgender issues.

“With respect to so-called ‘temporary special measures,’ and other measures intended to achieve parity for women and girls, the United States opposes the use of quotas, targets, or goals for participation based on sex,” the U.S. asserted in a March 2025 explanation of vote on what the U.S. would not support the declaration.

“It is the policy of the United States to protect the civil rights of all Americans and to promote individual initiative, excellence, and hard work.  Every citizen, including women and girls, should have an equal right and opportunities, without discrimination, to take part in the conduct of public affairs.”

In the latest round of negotiations, the U.S. proposed stripping out references to phrases such as “reproductive violence,” “marginalized population,” “gender equality,” and “feminization of poverty,” as part of a vocabulary of global progressive buzzwords that cross red lines laid down by Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

It opposed language characterizing “structural discrimination” as a human rights violation or underscoring a “right to development,” claiming such a right is not recognized in any of the U.N.’s core conventions and is not recognized as an individual right, according to notes from the negotiations.

The U.S. also sought to kill a proposal encouraging governments to invest in “evidence-based” data systems to combat “disinformation, misinformation and hate speech” targeting women and girls, on the grounds that the administration does “not support any form of censorship in any area.”

The Trump administration also objected to a proposal to develop “safeguards” to “eliminate gender-based violence” promoted by social media and new and emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms. The U.S. delegation said it “doesn’t support state level regulation on AI that would suppress freedom of speech for Americans,” according to notes from the talks.

Critics claimed that Washington was seeking to derail the negotiations and would like to break the consensus on the final outcome declaration, as it did at last year’s session.

“They didn’t show up to negotiate,” said a civil society representative in the room for the talks, who agreed to speak to Devex on background to protect their organization. “They came to be an obstructionist force.”

“They were proposing entirely new edits and changing line-by-line words within the text,” they added.

While the U.S. achieved limited gains in the talks, it did secure some victories by extracting provisions encouraging greater civil society participation in the CSW work by progressive groups, including feminist, women's, and youth organizations, while preserving a role for faith-based groups.

Women’s rights groups fear that the U.S. is gradually whittling away hard-fought achievements on women’s rights.

“At best, we're treading water, but more likely, we're falling backwards on women's rights and gender equality every time the word gender even appears in a document,” said Jessica Stern, copresident of the Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice.

“Even if they're losing on … some of the bigger issues that they tackle, they always get something right, right? There's always a win, and it's often a win at the expense of civil society, a win … at the expense of naming the most marginalized.”

“We know that when the U.S. engages, it has the potential to bring others along with it and with the votes to advance a conservative worldview that seeks to undermine women's and girls rights and gender equality globally.”