Explainer: Women’s Rights and Gender Equality as a Foreign Policy Priority
Inequality between women and men is deeply rooted in social norms of femininity and masculinity — often referred to as gender norms — that shape expectations about women’s and men’s roles, rights, responsibilities, and obligations. These norms are reinforced through policies, institutions, and market forces that historically have systematically disadvantaged girls and women by giving boys and men greater access to resources, opportunities, and decision-making power.
Rectifying this disadvantage is not only a fundamental human rights imperative — it is also a strategic investment with far-reaching returns. Women comprise more than half of the world’s population and are essential to the effective functioning of families, economies, and societies, yet too often lack the same rights, protections, resources, and opportunities as men.
Advancing gender equality benefits everyone. When women have equal rights and equal access to education, employment, finance, property, and decision-making power, families are stronger, economies are more productive, and communities are more resilient. The evidence is overwhelming: investing in gender equality accelerates economic growth, reduces poverty, increases food security, strengthens democratic governance, helps prevent conflict, and builds lasting peace and stability. Gender equality is therefore not simply a matter of fairness — it is a powerful driver of more prosperous, inclusive, and stable societies.
A Bipartisan Legacy Supporting Women’s Equality and Empowerment
For more than three decades, advancing women’s rights and gender equality has been one of the few areas of U.S. foreign policy to enjoy sustained bipartisan support. Democratic and Republican administrations alike recognized that women’s rights and leadership are not only matters of equality and human rights — they strengthen democracy, economic development, peace, and U.S. national security. Congress and successive administrations built an institutional framework to embed these priorities across diplomacy, development, and defense policy rather than treat them as a standalone issue.
This bipartisan commitment evolved across administrations, with each building on the institutional foundation its predecessors established. In 1994, Congress created the State Department’s senior coordinator for International Women’s Issues, establishing an early mechanism to integrate women’s rights into U.S. foreign policy. During the George W. Bush Administration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helped elevate conflict-related sexual violence as a diplomatic priority, contributing to UN Security Council Resolution 1820, which recognized sexual violence as a tactic of war.
In 2000, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security, a landmark legal framework linking women’s rights and gender equality to international peace and security. In 2011, the Obama administration developed the United States first National Action Plan on Resolution 1325, which recognized women not simply as victims of conflict but as essential peacebuilders, political leaders, and partners in preventing instability and rebuilding societies.
The Obama administration expanded this framework by establishing the Office of Global Women’s Issues in 2009, led by an ambassador-at-large, and integrating women’s rights and empowerment across diplomacy, development, economic, and defense policy. Even though the mandate of that office was narrowed significantly during the first Trump administration, it is noteworthy that in 2017, Congress passed — and President Trump signed — the Women, Peace, and Security Act, requiring a government-wide strategy to increase women’s participation in conflict prevention, peacebuilding, and security. In 2019, the Trump administration issued the first U.S. Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security, explicitly linking women’s participation to both human rights and U.S. national security.
The Biden administration further institutionalized this approach through the White House Gender Policy Council, the first National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, renewed emphasis on the Office of Global Women’s Issues, and strengthened implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security Act. The administration also broadened its approach to gender equality by recognizing how gender intersects with race, disability, socioeconomic status, and LGBTQI+ rights to shape and intensify vulnerability.
Trump Dismantles a Bipartisan Legacy
The second Trump administration has reversed decades of bipartisan progress, including policies passed during his first term, by dismantling much of the institutional architecture that enabled the United States to promote women’s rights and gender equality abroad. Rather than simply shifting policy priorities, the administration eliminated the offices, personnel, and expertise that made sustained implementation possible.
Most notably, the administration dismantled the Office of Global Women’s Issues, despite its ability to turn a modest annual foreign assistance budget of $10 million into outsized impact. Its programs invested in women’s leadership, local networks, and economic opportunity — building infrastructure that continued to save lives and strengthen communities long after the initial investment. In Sierra Leone, for example, support for women’s leadership helped establish networks and local infrastructure that enabled a rapid response to the Ebola outbreak years later. Microloan programs for women achieved a 98 percent repayment rate while helping lift entire communities out of poverty. By eliminating those investments in women and girls, the administration eroded community health and undermined economic growth and poverty reduction.
The administration also eliminated the ambassador-at-large position responsible for coordinating gender policy across the State Department. The loss of specialized leadership and staff significantly weakened the government’s ability to implement the Women, Peace, and Security Act, even though the law remained in force. At the same time, the broader restructuring and weakening of democracy, human rights, and gender-focused offices reduced the institutional capacity necessary to integrate gender considerations into U.S. foreign policy.
The administration’s closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the resulting cuts to foreign assistance disproportionately affected women and girls globally. Draconian cuts to humanitarian assistance have left at least 1 million women and girls without access to vital humanitarian and other critical support, even as conflicts around the world have intensified. At the same time, the administration eliminated 94 percent of U.S. funding for sexual and reproductive health, nearly 80 percent of funding for prevention and response services for gender-based violence, and 88 percent of funding for maternal and child health.
Soon after taking office, the administration reinstated and dramatically expanded the Mexico City Policy, which historically conditioned U.S. family-planning assistance on non-governmental organizations agreeing not to use funds from any source to perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning. Under the banner of “Promoting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance,” the administration broadened the policy to cover nearly all non-military foreign assistance and extended its reach to U.S. and foreign NGOs, international organizations, and foreign governments. The expansion also goes far beyond abortion: it now restricts activities related to what the administration calls “discriminatory equity ideology” and “gender ideology.” This sweeping expansion threatens to constrain a broad range of organizations and programs working on women’s rights, gender equality, and reproductive health around the world.
At the same time, the administration ended support for critical gender data collection efforts, including the Demographic and Health Surveys, making it increasingly difficult to measure and monitor global trends in women’s participation, protection, and well-being — and to identify where needs are growing most urgently. The administration’s 2025 Human Rights Reports compounded this loss of accountability by entirely removing the dedicated section on women’s and girls’ rights from every country report. In doing so, the reports eliminated an essential resource for governments, advocates, and courts seeking to document, track, and respond to gender-based human rights abuses.
Additionally, restrictions on language related to gender, diversity, and sexual and reproductive health extended across the federal government and into multilateral negotiations, where the United States sought to remove these concepts from international agreements.
Without dedicated institutional leadership, technical expertise, foreign assistance, reliable data, and sustained international engagement on gender equality and women’s rights, the United States is less equipped to address gender-based violence, support women’s political participation, strengthen women’s economic empowerment, or ensure women have meaningful roles in conflict prevention and peacebuilding. The consequences damage not just women but America’s ability to promote peace, stability, and prosperity.
What Is at Stake for Americans
Investing in women and girls is not simply a matter of fairness or charity. Gender equality is a powerful driver of more prosperous, inclusive, and stable societies, and benefits extend well beyond national borders. When women and girls have access to education, economic opportunity, health care, and decision-making power, communities are better equipped to withstand crises, economies are stronger, and societies are more stable. Conversely, failing to invest in women and girls can deepen poverty, fuel instability, and weaken the institutions needed to prevent conflict and respond to global health threats.
For Americans, these consequences do not stop at the border. Instability abroad can create national security challenges; economic disruption can affect American workers, farmers, and businesses; and infectious diseases can spread rapidly across borders. Investments in women and girls are therefore not only investments in their futures — they are investments in a more prosperous, stable, and secure world that advances U.S. interests.
The bipartisan support that the Women, Peace, and Security policy has received across multiple U.S. administrations reflects a recognition of this connection. Few areas demonstrate more clearly how empowering women can advance American security interests. Women’s participation strengthens peace negotiations, counterterrorism efforts, and post-conflict stabilization. Research on peace agreements around the world found that agreements reached with women participating in the peace process were 35 percent more likely to last at least 15 years. Women also bring critical knowledge of their communities that can help U.S. forces understand local dynamics, build trust, identify threats, and carry out missions more safely and effectively.
The lesson is straightforward: investing in women and girls is not peripheral to America’s interests — it is one of the tools that can help advance them.
What Better Would Look Like
Restoring U.S. leadership on women’s rights and gender equality requires rebuilding the bipartisan institutional framework that has guided American foreign policy for more than three decades. A future administration should:
Reestablish the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues: Led by an ambassador-at-large and reporting directly to the secretary of state, the office should lead efforts to integrate women’s perspectives and contributions into U.S. foreign policy. Reinstating that office will also help to restore U.S. leadership in bilateral and multilateral efforts to advance women’s rights, including efforts to address conflict-related sexual violence and promote gender equality.
Advancing women’s rights and leadership is not only an American value but a strategic investment that strengthens democracy, expands economic opportunity, improves development outcomes, reduces instability, and contributes to lasting peace and security.
© 2025 Alliance for Diplomacy and Justice.
