The current moment of feminism in Latin America and in much of the world is characterized by an increasingly evident tension between regulatory advances that recognize rights and a political climate that hinders their real implementation. This reflects a kind of mismatch between what is written into law and what actually takes place in women’s everyday lives.
Recently, legal progress has been made which, in another context, could be read as unequivocal signs of the consolidation of the feminist movement—such as the recently announced intention of the Mexican State to standardize the crime of femicide across the entire country with clear criteria and harsher penalties. This is, undoubtedly, an initiative aimed at closing historical gaps in the judicial interpretation of violence against women and reflects the sustained pressure of feminist organizations for the legal system to recognize the specificity of these crimes.
In Colombia, the approval of Law 2447 of 2025, which absolutely prohibits child marriage and early unions, represents a significant step forward in protecting the rights of girls and adolescents. By eliminating a legal exception that, for more than a century, allowed these practices with family authorization, the law definitively raises the minimum age for marriage to 18. This legislation closes a historical door to the normalization of deeply unequal relationships—a victory made possible after multiple failed attempts in Congress and thanks to sustained pressure from feminist organizations, civil society, and committed political leadership.
The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, enacted on March 31, 2026, a law that progressively extends paternity leave from 5 to 20 days by 2029. The measure includes the creation of a “paternity salary,” funded by social security to guarantee full wages and promote shared responsibility in caregiving.
Another example is Panama, where progress toward consolidating a National Care System as a public policy is marking a milestone in how the State recognizes and redistributes care work—historically invisible and feminized—by assuming it as a collective responsibility rather than an individual burden placed on women. This transformation not only expands rights on paper, but also redefines the foundations upon which social and economic life is organized, and is part of a broader regional conversation that seeks to place care at the center of development.
All these advances are part of a broader trend in which States, at least formally, are incorporating more robust legal frameworks to address gender inequality. However, these achievements coexist with a political context in the region that seems to be moving in the opposite direction—marked by the strengthening of conservative discourses, the delegitimization of equality agendas, and open questioning of feminist public policies—thus creating a hostile environment for these advances to translate into concrete transformations.
SubstantiveeEquality vs. Formal equality
In Latin America, recent March 8 mobilizations were marked by slogans reflecting this concern, with thousands of women denouncing not only the persistence of violence, but also the rollback of institutional guarantees and the lack of political will to sustain what has been achieved.
This contradiction reveals an uncomfortable truth at the heart of contemporary feminism: the legal recognition of rights does not in itself ensure their enforcement, especially when the political and cultural environment does not support that recognition.
At the global level, the magnitude of the gap becomes impossible to ignore when one observes that women hold only 64% of the legal rights recognized for men—a figure that not only reveals the persistence of structural inequalities, but also calls into question the narrative of sustained progress that often accompanies normative advances. Even in contexts where new laws or reforms are celebrated, the foundation upon which these achievements are built remains deeply unequal.
This compels us to look beyond institutional enthusiasm and recognize that the problem is not limited to the absence of legal frameworks in certain countries, but rather cuts across the global system as a whole. It shows that full legal equality remains a distant promise, and that any progress must always be understood in relation to this structural debt that continues to shape the experience of millions of women around the world.
What is at stake, then, is not only the approval of new regulations, but the possibility of sustaining them in contexts where resistance is growing—where political actors build capital by challenging the gender agenda, and where narratives are reintroduced that seek to return women to subordinate positions under the guise of tradition, order, or stability.
In this scenario, feminism faces a complex challenge: defending what has been achieved while continuing to push for structural change—a task that requires public engagement grounded in demonstrating the capacity for social mobilization.
The tension between legal progress and political backlash also highlights the limits of a strategy focused exclusively on institutional frameworks. While laws are fundamental tools, their effectiveness depends on broader conditions that include gender-sensitive judicial systems, sustained public policies, and, above all, a social environment that does not tolerate violence or discrimination. When these elements fail, laws risk becoming symbolic declarations that coexist with practices that contradict them.
An optimistic reading
In this context, contemporary feminism finds itself in a stage that could be described as one of conflictive consolidation, where its achievements are as undeniable as the backlash they have generated. Far from being interpreted as a sign of weakness, this reaction can be read as evidence of the movement’s transformative capacity, since advances that do not provoke discomfort rarely alter power structures.
The resistance observed today in different countries arises in response to decades of organization, denunciation, and proposal that have succeeded in establishing gender equality as an unavoidable issue on the public agenda.
Thinking about this moment from that perspective allows us to move beyond a narrative of linear regression and to recognize the complexity of a contested process, where each achievement opens new tensions and where the path toward equality is far from orderly or irreversible.
The challenge, then, lies not only in continuing to expand rights on paper, but in building the political, cultural, and institutional conditions that allow those rights to take root in the lives of men and women—even in adverse scenarios where power seeks to roll back what once seemed secured.
Autor
Psicóloga. Master en Políticas Públicas con enfoque de género. Especialista en Transformación Cultural y Coaching Ontológico. Directora de FeminismoINC. Autora de "Incomodar para Transformar" y "Atrevidas: Manual de trabajo personal por el activismo feminista".
