Executive Snapshot
Reporting from CSW70, this analysis argues that women’s inequality under the law is not a vague cultural residue but the result of identifiable legal, institutional, and political choices. The article moves from personal observation to constitutional critique, global ranking data, and the diplomatic rupture surrounding the United States’ lone “no” vote against the CSW Agreed Conclusions.
Institutional Focus
Commission on the Status of Women, constitutional equality, women’s access to justice, multilateral gender governance, global legal standards, representation, and enforcement.
Editorial Context
This publication forms part of CSNN’s institutional coverage of the 70th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women, examining structural inequalities through legal, diplomatic, and civic lenses.
Reporting from CSW70 on why women are still not equal under the law
UNITED NATIONS, New York — I walked into the Commission on the Status of Women expecting to hear about gaps. What I didn’t expect was to hear that no country on earth has closed them.
Not one.
We talk about inequality like it’s a cultural problem. Something vague. Something slowly improving with time. But sitting in that room, listening to leaders from around the world, it became clear that inequality is not an accident. It is a decision.
The President of the General Assembly, Annalena Baerbock, said something that stayed with me:
And if that is true, then equality is not something we drift toward.
It is something we choose.
Or not.
The illusion most Americans live in
I feel that most Americans tend to believe women already have equal rights under the Constitution.
They do not.
There is still no explicit guarantee of equality on the basis of sex in the U.S. Constitution. That surprises some. It certainly surprised me.
Because like a lot of Americans, I grew up believing something different.
I grew up in a home where equality was not debated. It was lived.
My mom worked just as hard as my dad. She contributed just as much. She was never treated as less than. Not quietly. Not indirectly. Not at all.
They were not competing. They were partnered.
I also had two older sisters who were strong, capable, and vocal. They did not show me what it meant to be less than. They showed me what it meant to stand on your own.
Then I met my wife.
Before I met her, I used to say I did not want someone walking behind me or in front of me. I wanted someone walking beside me.
Equal. Independent. Building something together.
And I found that.
Which is why it was such a shock to sit in that room and realize that what felt normal in my life is not normal in law.
Not globally.
Not structurally.
Not even here.
The numbers we do not feel
Globally, women have about 64 percent of the legal rights of men.
That is not perception. That is what the law allows.
More than half of countries still do not define rape based on consent.
Child marriage remains legal in most of the world, including in 34 U.S. states.
Nearly half of countries do not require equal pay for equal value.
And in nearly 70 percent of countries, women face greater barriers to accessing justice.
The CSW70 Secretary-General’s report described it with a metaphor that is hard to ignore.
Two roads running side by side.
Problems moving one way.
Justice moving the other.
They never meet.
In the United States, those roads have been running parallel for a long time.
We see it in the wage gap, where women working full-time earn just 80.9 cents for every dollar earned by men — even with equal or higher levels of education.
We see it in poverty rates, where 11.6 percent of all women in America live below the poverty line, with single mothers and women of color disproportionately affected.
We see it in the reality that access to rights can change depending on where you live, what you earn, or which court is making the decision.
This is not a single failure.
It is a system of them.
One hundred years of waiting
The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced in 1923.
It is still not fully recognized as enforceable law.
More than a century later, the United States has not embedded gender equality into its constitutional foundation.
That absence matters.
Because without it, every protection women have exists at a lower level of legal authority.
Which means it can be narrowed.
It can be challenged.
It can be taken away.
We saw that clearly in 2022 with the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
For nearly 50 years, a constitutional protection existed.
Then it did not.
Within months, clinics closed in 15 states. Access disappeared. Millions of women found themselves living under entirely different legal realities depending on where they lived.
That decision did more than change one policy.
It introduced something the United States rarely acknowledged before.
Regression.
The idea that rights once recognized can be removed.
Without constitutional protection, that risk never goes away.
When inequality becomes a choice
There was a moment during the session that made all of this impossible to ignore.
The Commission adopted its Agreed Conclusions, a reaffirmation of women’s rights that has been adopted by consensus every year since 1996.
Thirty-seven countries voted in favor.
One voted against.
It was the first time in the 70-year history of the CSW that its Agreed Conclusions were put to a recorded vote rather than adopted by consensus.
That is not drift.
That is not confusion.
That is not slow progress.
That is a decision.
So, if inequality is a choice, then so is equality.
“No conversations about us without us”
An Ecuadorian lawyer and gender-based violence survivor, Ljubica Fuentes, said something that cut through everything else:
It should not be a radical idea.
But it still is.
Because decisions about women’s rights are too often made in rooms where women are underrepresented, outnumbered, or absent all together.
We see it in legislatures, where women hold only 28 percent of seats in Congress.
We see it in courtrooms.
We see it in global institutions.
And we see it in outcomes.
When the people affected by decisions are not fully present in making them, the results reflect that absence.
Maybe not always intentionally.
But consistently.
Power, perception, and what we miss
I had to sit with something uncomfortable while I was there.
I am a white man from the United States.
That comes with a level of built-in comfort that is easy to mistake for normal.
I can move through the world assuming things will generally work in my favor. That the system will recognize me. That I will be heard.
And when that is your baseline, it warps your perception.
It makes inequality harder to see.
Because you are not the one experiencing it.
That does not make me unique.
It makes me typical.
And that is part of the problem.
Because systems rarely feel broken to the people they are working for.
The question we are not asking clearly enough
All of this sits in the shadow of something else.
The reality that power, money, and influence can shield abuse.
We have seen what happens when systems fail to hold people accountable.
The Epstein network forced a question into the open that we still have not fully answered:
Are we actually capable of protecting women?
Not just in theory but in practice.
Because laws matter.
But enforcement matters just as much.
And when enforcement fails, equality becomes conditional. Because true justice equals recognition in law.
The global contradiction
The United States has long positioned itself as a leader on human rights.
But the reality looks different when placed in a global context.
The rankings confirm what the vote made visible.
In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (2025), the United States ranks 43rd out of 148 countries, trailing not only Nordic nations but also countries it rarely considers peers on human rights.
In the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law Index (2024), multiple countries achieved a perfect score on legal equality. The United States did not.
In the Women, Peace and Security Index (2025/26), the United States falls outside the top 20.
These are not perception-based rankings.
They measure laws, participation, safety, and opportunity.
And they tell a consistent story.
The United States is not leading on gender equality.
It is lagging.
The contradiction deepened on March 9, 2026, in the very room where this commission convened. For the first time in 70 years, the United States cast the only “no” vote against the adoption of the CSW Agreed Conclusions, breaking a tradition of consensus that had held since 1996. The vote was 37 in favor, 1 against, 6 abstentions. Before the vote, the U.S. delegation proposed eight amendments targeting language on reproductive health, gender identity, and AI regulation — all rejected 26 to 1. The General Assembly Hall erupted in a standing ovation when the conclusions passed despite Washington’s opposition. A nation that lectures the world on human rights had just become the world’s lone holdout against them.
What equality actually requires
There is a parable in the Gospel of Luke about a shepherd with one hundred sheep and one goes missing.
The shepherd does not punish the ninety-nine. He does not take anything from them. He does not diminish what they have.
He simply goes after the one that was left behind.
And when he finds it, he carries it home.
Not as a burden. As something worth restoring.
The point of the story is simple.
No one is expendable.
And bringing someone back does not take anything away from those who were never lost.
That matters here.
Because one of the quiet fears underneath conversations about equality is that something will be taken.
That if women gain equal standing under the law, men must lose something in return.
But that is not how equality works.
We are not redistributing dignity.
We are recognizing it.
We are not lowering one group to lift another.
We are closing a gap that should not exist in the first place.
The UN CSW70 report lays out what closing that gap requires.
Legal reform. Enforcement. Representation. Investment.
In the United States, that begins with unfinished business.
Its ratification would move gender equality to the highest level of constitutional protection.
But it does not stop there.
It means closing legal loopholes that allow child marriage in 34 states.
It means establishing real, enforceable equal pay standards.
It means ensuring access to legal representation.
It means examining how emerging technologies, including AI in the justice system, may reinforce existing biases.
And it means supporting the organizations that have carried this work forward for decades.
None of this requires taking something away from men.
It requires finishing what was never completed.
What this really comes down to
This is not just about policy.
It is about something simpler.
If you would not want someone else making decisions about your life without you, why would we accept that for anyone else?
I try to live by a simple standard.
Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
That applies here.
Because equality is not abstract.
It is personal.
It is the difference between walking beside someone and asking them to walk behind you.
And right now, in too many places, in too many systems, we are still asking women to walk behind.
The question is not whether that is acceptable.
The question is whether we are willing to change it.
And that, like everything else I heard in that room, is a choice.
Author: James Marlin
Journalist & Contributor, CSNN (United States)
