Women are on the frontlines of the climate crisis: farmers sustaining up to 80 percent of food production in many developing countries, indigenous leaders protecting biodiversity, and first responders during climate disasters.
The Gender Snapshot 2024 report indicates that by 2050, climate change may push up to 158 million more women and girls into poverty (16 million more than the total number of men and boys). Even today, 47.8 million more women face food insecurity and hunger than men. Women produce nearly one-third of the world’s food, and FAO data show they make up about 43% of the global agricultural workforce, with even higher levels in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. Yet women remain particularly vulnerable to climate impacts due to limited access to land, finance, resources, and decision-making power. Strengthening women’s leadership in shaping climate policies is therefore crucial, yet they continue to be underrepresented in national and international decision-making processes.
From Gaza and Ukraine to Tigray, Sudan and Congo, this webinar will address the weaponization of women’s bodies in ongoing armed conflicts, the constantly soaring dimension of sexual violence as a war tool and the structural neglect of survivors’ plights and needs. In 2024, wars and global violence reached its highest levels in decades, with 61 state-based armed conflicts recorded the most since the end of the Second World War and roughly 110 total armed conflicts identified under international humanitarian-law criteria The United Nations verified more than 4,600 cases of conflict-related sexual violence, marking an 87 percent increase from 2022. Across many countries, armed groups continued to use sexual violence as a tactic to terrorize communities, force displacement, and gain control over land and resources. Despite the escalating scale of violence, women’s participation in peace processes, security decision making, and conflict-prevention efforts remains persistently low. Access to justice, reparations, and protection for survivors also remains limited, leaving a profound gap between the harm experienced and the support available.
The online dialogue will investigate:
- What realities and forms of violence do women face during armed conflict, and how do these experiences shape the wellbeing and resilience of entire communities
- What examples of women’s solidarity, protection networks, and local peace initiatives emerge in the midst of war, and what do they reveal about women’s roles as agents of change?
- What progress are governments and policy makers making to ensure the full, equal, and meaningful participation of women in peace processes, security institutions, and political decision-making spaces during and after conflict?
Digital platforms have profoundly reshaped the way gender norms are constructed, contested, and amplified. The “manosphere” — a network of online communities promoting male dominance, anti-feminist ideologies, and regressive models of masculinity — has gained significant influence. Man-influencers and digital entrepreneurs have brought these narratives into the mainstream, shaping how many young men understand identity, power, and gender relations.This discussion will explore how misogyny is fuelled and normalized online, how these narratives intersect with far-right and authoritarian agendas, and the role of religious influencers who use faith-based arguments to legitimise patriarchal hierarchies. Most importantly, we aim to reflect on the real-world consequences and on how civil society and feminist movements can mobilise effectively in response.
This discussion will explore:
- Why manosphere narratives resonate so deeply, particularly among young people
- How these spaces intersect with far-right and authoritarian politics
- The role of religious digital influencers in legitimizing patriarchal hierarchies
- The broader societal impacts
- How civil society and feminist movements can respond strategically and collectively.
The womb — the primary site of life — has always been a battleground for political struggle and reproductive controversies, situated at the crossroads of gender issues, sexual conventions, human demography, and social constructs. Maternity policies and the wars over abortion, and even the developments concerning the management of HIV/AIDS, have shaped laws regarding the womb and demographic cultures, forcing women to accept, willingly or not, the social determinants of fertility (Simonstein, 2022).
More than even today, across the globe, women’s bodies are brought back as the central venue around which to shape political, nationalist, and ideological agendas. National governments – more and more intentionally — are advancing pro-natalist policies, including restrictions on legalized abortion and limits on access to contraception methods. Overall, constraints on sexual and reproductive rights have become mainstream in the North and South hemispheres. Reproductive and sexual autonomy is seen as a matter of national survival, demographic strength, cultural identity, or moral order.
Orchestrated conservative initiatives mostly backed politically and financially by religious groups — from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in the USA to pro-natalist and 2025 bans of “child-free lifestyles” policies in Russia, from barriers dismantling Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights (SRHRs) implementation in Argentina to restrictive reproductive governance backed by faith-based actors in several parts of Africa — well illustrate how coordinated legal, policy, and cultural strategies are widely deployed to counter women’s self-determination restrict sexual and reproductive rights and reshape drastically hamper women’s agency.
The webinar explores the rise of transnational and strategic conservative activism against women, through a brutal sexual and reproductive rights agenda : anti-gender networks are not peripheral; they increasingly operate within mainstream politics and institutions, shaping the public discourse and normative standards, including at the United Nations. Laws that challenge SRHRs rapidly advance. Yet, these regressive waves are also contested by feminist solidarity movements, youth collectives, and grassroots actors. Resistance to misogyny as an ideological cornerstone and political tool of authoritarianism, whose zero-sum vision of gender insists on the idea that any gain for all women comes at men’s expense, is embedded in widespread actions of civil society. These highlight strategies of solidarity, advocacy, and defense of reproductive and sexual autonomy.
Organized by:
The Geneva Global Health Hub (G2H2), together with the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH).
Sponsored by:
Medico international and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, New York Office.
