International Women’s Day 2025 – For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.

On 8 March 2025, join us to celebrate International Women’s Day under the theme, For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.

This year’s theme calls for action that can unlock equal rights, power and opportunities for all and a feminist future where no one is left behind. Central to this vision is empowering the next generation — youth, particularly young women and adolescent girls — as catalysts for lasting change.

The year 2025 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 by 189 governments, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action remains the most progressive and widely endorsed blueprint for women’s and girls’ rights worldwide. The Platform guides policies, programmes and investment that impact critical areas such as education, health, peace, media, political participation, economic empowerment, and the elimination of violence against women and girls. Addressing these issues, along with emerging priorities around climate justice and the power of digital technologies, is urgent, with just five years left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

The thirtieth anniversary comes amid growing insecurity and compounding crises, diminishing trust in democracy, and shrinking civic space. Last year alone, 612 million women and girls lived amid armed conflict, a 50 per cent increase in just a decade.

For ALL Women and Girls is a rallying cry to take action in three key areas:

1. Women rights: Fight relentlessly for women’s and girls’ full range of human rights, challenging all forms of violence, discrimination and exploitation.
2. Gender equality: Address systemic barriers, dismantle patriarchy, transform entrenched inequities, and elevate the voices of marginalized women and girls, including young people, to ensure inclusivity and empowerment.
3. Empowerment: Ensure inclusive access to education, employment, leadership, decision-making spaces, and opportunities for young women and girls to lead and innovate.

Engage the media, corporate leaders, governments, community leaders, civil society, youth and others with influence to take action in your communities. Ask leaders to take action and invest in promoting women’s rights and gender equality. Share International Women’s Day stories and messages on digital platforms, using the hashtag #ForAllWomenAndGirls.

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action transformed the women’s rights agenda:

1. Legal Protection: Before 1995, only 12 countries had legal sanctions against domestic violence. Today, there are 1,583 legislative measures in place across 193 countries, including 354 targeting domestic violence specifically.
2. Access to services: Essential services like shelters, legal aid, counselling, and healthcare for survivors of violence. have expanded globally, offering critical lifelines for countless women and girls.
3. Youth engagement: A new wave of young feminists are now shaping movements for gender justice, leveraging digital platforms, and driving activism for equality.
4. Changing social norms: Women’s rights movements worldwide are challenging harmful stereotypes, ideas and practices, and paving the way for gender equal policies, laws and institutions.
5. Women’s participation in peace: Today, there are 112 countries with national action plans on women, peace and security – a significant increase from only 19 in 2010. These plans have been key in facilitating women’s participation in peacebuilding and post-conflict recovery, enabling their access to decision-making positions, and paving the way for new laws to address sexual violence in conflict.

This International Women’s Day, join UN Women to march forward for women’s rights. The world cannot afford a step back.