What are those advances, and how can we learn from them? And should more countries consider what is known as a feminist foreign policy? I spoke with Thompson, the founder and CEO of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, on the latest episode of FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.
The persistence of gender inequality in countries and companies is well known. By some accounts, it would take more than a century for women to achieve true parity with men in a range of indicators, from leadership roles to opportunities. But as Lyric Thompson wrote in FP recently, progress isn’t linear — and there have indeed been real advances in countries around the world.
What are those advances, and how can we learn from them? And should more countries consider what is known as a feminist foreign policy? I spoke with Thompson, the founder and CEO of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, on the latest episode of FP Live. Subscribers can watch the full discussion on the video box atop this page or follow the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.
Ravi Agrawal: It can feel counterintuitive to say women’s rights are “winning,” to cite your piece. What are people missing here?
Lyric Thompson: Yes, I was surprised myself. This headline comes from a year of research that I conducted with my colleagues at the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, where we looked at every country around the world that has announced, or in some cases renounced, a feminist foreign policy. We do a global status update, and given the headlines going into this exercise, I really thought this was going to be the beginning of the end of the project, because the bad news feels overwhelming.
But we were shocked to find progress proliferating across the globe in every U.N. region — in a number of cases, as a direct response to setbacks. That is a really important story to tell, because otherwise our narrative of progress is incomplete. Women’s movements are learning from setbacks; they’re organizing, they’re coming back, and they’re effectively making progress in places that we just don’t hear about. So it’s our role to tell that story.
RA: In the piece you wrote for Foreign Policy, you mentioned Mexico, Chile, and Spain — talk to us about the trend lines you’re seeing.
LT: There’s a solid trend line on women’s political representation. Countries are taking concrete steps, whether through quotas, affirmative action policies, or presidential commitments. Mexico has achieved 50 percent of women in the legislature in addition to having a woman win as head of government. It has also committed to interviewing and accelerating female candidates and their diplomatic corps at a 2-to-1 ratio.
We know that this is an uphill battle. The numbers show us that it’s going to take 130 years to reach full gender equality and political representation, but we have solutions, and this is one of the countries that is implementing them.
RA: Mexico seemingly made a big advance when it elected Claudia Sheinbaum last year as its first female president. Recently, there were awful scenes of a man groping her in public — you get the feeling of “one step forward, one step back.” You’re saying that’s not how we should be seeing this.
LT: Her response was perfect. As the first female president, she’s under enormous pressure to look strong, to project strength, and also not to remind people too often that she’s a woman. There would have been a clear pathway on the basis of those conditions and the constraints on women in leadership, particularly when you’re the first, to not report that — to just brush it off and try to bury the incident as quickly as possible.
But she was very intentional in responding and saying, this is a problem that we have in Mexico and the world: One in three women globally will experience physical or sexual violence in her lifetime. And if I do not report this — if I do not demonstrate confidence in the institutions that are obligated to treat this as a crime and respond accordingly — then what example is that setting for the rest of the women in my country and globally?
I thought that response was really important considering the fact that Mexico does have a femicide problem. Sheinbaum’s predecessor had a real problem with addressing it; in fact, he asserted that it was a political hoax. So there was a question going into Sheinbaum’s presidency about whether she, too, would take that line and diminish this as an issue.
RA: I want to talk about the importance of the top job, and what that does to representation more broadly in a country, or company, even. Take the role of president or prime minister. Sri Lanka had its first female head of government in 1960. Staying in that region, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have all had female leaders — Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Khaleda Zia, Sheikh Hasina.
But although these countries broke a glass ceiling before many Western countries did, they don’t fare well on women’s rights in general. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 gender gap rankings, which includes 148 countries, Bangladesh is 24th, Sri Lanka is 130th, India is 131st, and Pakistan is dead last. What does it tell us when progress doesn’t happen across the board?
LT: As Americans know, the election of Barack Obama should not be read in the United States as an indication that we’ve eliminated racism. Similarly, the election or appointment of women leaders in countries where women as a body are being prevented from exercising their full human rights should not be read as an indication that sexism has been solved in those countries.
Presidencies are important and visible institutions, and other women leaders will say how important it was to have a mentor, to see themselves in a leader. But these advances are not one-to-one with culture, which is much bigger and more complex, and has deeply seeded “-isms” baked in. It’s going to take much more, including some of the proactive policy maneuvers that we know work, such as quotas and affirmative action, to really tackle this on a larger scale, because this is a numbers game ultimately.
RA: How does culture interplay with women’s rights in various ways around the world?
LT: The culture of misogyny and the glass ceiling are universal. Although manifestations of violence differ geographically, the universal norm is that one in three women will endure violence in her lifetime. Some regions have honor violence, or higher incidences of child marriage or female genital mutilation. In the United States, we have the highest number of homicides from gun deaths. So in each of our contexts, it’s incumbent upon us to figure out what solutions work.
The women’s movement has been extraordinarily successful in knowing how these problems manifest in their contexts, organizing across religious, ethnic, and partisan lines to advance solutions. Where there are more women in power, there is a greater propensity for policymaking to reflect family-friendly priorities.
A lot of Latin American feminists are organizing to assert caregiving as a right and provide care services for free. We also saw that as a very popular issue in the New York City mayoral election recently, and we are going to see an all-female transition team there. So there is a correlation between women’s rights activists and increasing numbers of women in political leadership — we do see these groups working together to tailor solutions that work.
RA: In such a polarized world, many countries are rocking violently between left-wing and right-wing governments, causing policy whiplash in a range of areas. How do nongovernmental groups navigate changes at the top and sustain progress in regards to women’s rights?
LT: There’s a spectrum of activity, and we need everybody across the spectrum. Folks on the think tank side are researching what works, whether quantifying a problem or testing solutions — for example, if a certain initiative to provide free child care brings women into the workforce or not. That’s an important resource for policymakers to be able to understand the challenges impacting the people they represent and the potential solutions.
Then there’s the pressure side, which is where the women’s rights movement is happening in the streets — being the watchdog, calling attention to grievances, and pressuring policymakers to respond accordingly. Organizations like my own attempt to play a bridge-building role. We have a number of amazing women leaders in government who are fighting these battles daily within bureaucracies that are not always friendly to them, and we connect them with women researchers and activists in constant conversation. We’ve seen the positive effects of this community nationally and transnationally.
RA: In the World Economic Forum’s gender gap, I noticed that year after year, Iceland, Finland, Norway, and Sweden usually show up in the top 10. What are they doing right that others could learn from?
LT: Certainly — the feminist foreign-policy work we do was started by Sweden. These are countries that are very good at prioritizing social protection and the safety net, the kinds of policies that women benefit from. When you’re providing health care and care services, it’s easier for women to enter the workforce. People have time to get used to women in the workforce and not wonder, for instance, if women in the workforce ruined the workforce, as we seem to be struggling with here in the United States.
RA: You’re referring to a New York Times headline.
LT: I am, that was briefly “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” It was a transcript of a podcast hosted by one of their opinion writers, Ross Douthat, with a couple of conservative thinkers about gender. It went over about as well as you probably imagine. They then backpedaled to “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” Which I also find problematic.
RA: Going back to the point you were making, so much of your work involves comparative policy outcomes. Globally, are there links between rising income levels and gender parity?
LT: It’s definitely true that human beings need a modicum of income, as well as other inputs, in order to survive and thrive. Income correlates for a while, and then taps out at the end — if you earn a billion dollars, for example, you will not fare that much better. So there’s a necessary floor, but that doesn’t relate all the way to the ceiling.
RA: Usually, in most parts of the world, the richer you get, the more female workforce participation increases. But in India, research presented a paradox: The numbers actually went the other way after families reached a certain income level. So there’s a cultural component here that muddies the waters, as it were. Every country and every culture has its own specific contexts and subtexts.
LT: Again, misogyny is universal, but the manifestations thereof do differ. At my previous organization, the International Center for Research on Women, we conducted a very interesting study in India on an intervention that was intended to delay the age of marriage by providing a conditional cash transfer upon the birth of a girl child. If a child was still unmarried at 18, then that family will receive a certain amount. The thinking was that, if this is purely an economic problem, then a conditional cash transfer would be tailor-made to solve it.
But without the gender norm conversation, the program was not as effective as it could have been. The economic side needed to happen in tandem with a conversation about goals — whether girls actually thrive if they finish their education and are able to avoid marriage, enter the workforce, and bring income back to the family; making the case for why this is helpful for families as opposed to, “Are you 18 and unmarried? OK, here’s a bunch of money.” It actually got referred to as the “dowry deal” because folks thought the government was just helping them marry their daughter off once she was 18.
RA: You are, of course, the founder and CEO of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative. What is a feminist foreign policy?
LT: In 2014, when Sweden gave the world its first feminist foreign policy, their foreign minister described it as a foreign policy that advances women’s rights, resources, and representation. She intended the Swedish government to use its various levers of foreign policy to advance women’ s rights: sponsoring U.N. resolutions on sexual and reproductive health, raising women’s rights in bilateral strategic dialogues with other nations, appointing more female ambassadors to their diplomatic corps, and increasing direct spending on gender equality programs for women’s rights organizations and foreign humanitarian assistance.
My work has been to say “yes, and” on that, and to make sure that this is not just a women-centric foreign policy, but a foreign policy that advances global goods as in the national interest — human rights more broadly, and climate resilience. This inverts our traditional understanding of foreign policy from the might-makes-right renaissance of military and economic dominance to how countries can work together and use the levers of foreign policy to eliminate inequality.
RA: What are the main countries that have adopted this?
LT: It’s a real mix. Sweden is actually one of the countries that renounced their feminist foreign policy. There are other European countries, like France — I just came from a ministerial event they hosted on feminist foreign policy — as well as Spain, which will be next year’s host. Latin America has made a lot of progress in this area in the last several years with Mexico, as well as Colombia and Chile.
RA: What happened in Sweden?
LT: It’s fascinating — the first renouncement of feminist foreign policy. They are not the only ones who have left, but there was a rightward swing in their 2022 elections, and the party that came into power seized on the feminist foreign-policy label and said they would renounce those policies on the first day of office.
There has been a lot of interrogation into the impetus of that change, especially as Sweden heads into elections next year. Because this policy became associated with one party, it was easy to target the incoming administration. We’ve seen this in the U.S.: A progressive administration comes in and wants to undo what a conservative administration has done, and vice versa. All of the opposition parties in Sweden have said they will reinstate the feminist foreign policy, because there was such a national outcry. It wasn’t a partisan issue; it represented what it means to be Sweden on the world stage. Since these parties are projected to win next year’s elections, Sweden might also be the first country to reinstate a feminist foreign policy — hopefully in a more durable manner now that this lesson about partisanship has been learned.
RA: The Sweden example strikes me as a microcosm of the larger argument you’ve been making, which is that progress isn’t linear. But you’re looking at the broader trend line globally, and that strikes you as something that is headed in the right direction?
LT: Absolutely. It’s not to say that the losses don’t sting, but we’re learning from them and fighting back. When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, France took a lesson from that and inserted a constitutional amendment declaring a right to abortion, to try to pressure-proof its own democracy for the future.
Similarly, after Sweden renounced its feminist foreign policy, several other countries are doing work to preserve and protect that agenda. Spain has pursued legislative codification in parliament, and countries like Chile have employed various administrative codes to embed the feminist foreign-policy framework in bureaucratic institutions.
What has sustained a lot of the progress in the anti-gender equality space is a much longer trajectory; they zoom out and think about the playbook over the course of decades. We are starting to do that in the women’s rights world now, thinking about this not as a battle that is won or lost from one administration to another, but as seeding a more durable, long-term foundation.
RA: How do women’s rights activist groups like yours respond to the moment in the United States that seems to be animated by an anti-woke, anti-DEI atmosphere — the rise of what are known as “tradwives,” for example? All of this strikes me as a backlash against the very things you’re describing. How do you prevent that?
LT: You have to use the messaging that works for your audience, as opposed to being faithful to a particular language. At the collaborative, we aim to use the language that works. You don’t have to call your foreign policy “feminist”; it’s the contents, not the container, that matters. Make sure you’re doing the kinds of things that promote human flourishing, and if the language that you’re using to articulate that agenda — the word “feminist,” for instance — isn’t working, then pick something else that does.
