Every year on March 8, the world pauses, if only briefly, to celebrate women on International Women’s Day. Companies launch campaigns filled with soft colours and inspiring slogans. Leaders publish statements praising resilience and progress. Panels are organised, hashtags trend, and for a moment the global conversation turns toward empowerment. Yet beyond the tributes sits a question that feels harder to ignore with each passing year. What exactly are we celebrating?
Because when the banners come down and the speeches end, the reality facing women across the world tells a different story. In 2026 the female body remains one of the most contested spaces in public life. Governments regulate it, societies debate it, and powerful institutions continue to shape the limits of women’s autonomy in ways that cut across cultures and ideologies. Women are praised as symbols of progress while their choices are scrutinised with extraordinary intensity. Freedom is promised in principle yet often rationed in practice.
Few issues reveal this contradiction as clearly as the politics surrounding a woman’s clothing. A single piece of fabric has become a global lightning rod. In Iran, the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2022 after her arrest by the country’s morality police for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly ignited global outrage and protests that spread far beyond the country’s borders. The demonstrations, carried by the now widely recognised slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” exposed the suffocating reality faced by many Iranian women whose appearance, movement and daily lives remain subject to strict enforcement.
Yet thousands of miles away, Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab encounter abuse of a different kind. Across parts of Europe, and particularly in France where debates about secularism and religious expression have become deeply politicised, Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab often encounter suspicion, harassment, and legislative restrictions. In 2020 two Muslim women wearing headscarves were violently attacked near the Eiffel Tower by assailants who reportedly tried to tear off their veils while shouting racist insults.
The irony is difficult to ignore. In one place a woman is punished for removing the hijab. In another she is pressured to remove it. The same object becomes a site of outrage from opposite directions, while the woman at the centre of the debate is rarely the one defining the terms of the conversation.
This pattern of using women as political currency extends far beyond clothing. Women’s rights have long been invoked as moral justification for geopolitical agendas and regime changes. For decades, the liberation of women in Iran and Afghanistan has been cited by foreign governments as evidence of why certain political systems must be challenged or replaced. Yet when the political calculus changes, those same women are often left navigating the consequences alone.
Nowhere is this more painfully visible than in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 has steadily erased women from public life. Girls are barred from attending secondary schools and universities, women are restricted from travelling without a male guardian, and even beauty salons, once among the few remaining places where women could gather, work and maintain some sense of normalcy, have been shut down. For millions of Afghan women the world has quite literally shrunk to the walls of their homes, their futures are determined by a rigid ideology that denies their place in society, not by ambition or talent.
Across the border in Pakistan, the pattern feels painfully familiar. In June 2025, 17-year-old TikToker Sana Yousaf was shot dead in Islamabad after reportedly rejecting a man’s advances, a case that reignited national outrage over how quickly a young woman’s visibility and independence can turn dangerous. And before that came the long, harrowing battle for justice in Noor Mukadam’s case, after the 27-year-old was murdered in Islamabad in July 2021, with appeals stretching on for years before Pakistan’s Supreme Court upheld the main murder conviction in May 2025.
Even in countries that present themselves as champions of women’s rights, the picture is far from straightforward. In the United States, long considered a global reference point for civil liberties, abortion rights were dramatically rolled back in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that had guaranteed federal protection for abortion access for nearly half a century. In the years since, dozens of states have enacted sweeping restrictions or outright bans, creating a fragmented landscape in which a woman’s reproductive rights depend largely on where she happens to live. Women in some states must now travel hundreds of miles to access procedures that were once considered fundamental healthcare. For many others, particularly those without financial means, the option simply no longer exists. Once again, the female body has become a site of political struggle, its autonomy debated in courtrooms and legislatures by people who will never personally face the consequences of those decisions.
Beyond laws and policies, violence and exploitation against women continue to unfold within spaces that outwardly project power and prestige. The revelations surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s network exposed how deeply abuse can operate within elite circles where influence shields wrongdoing. Dozens of women and underage girls were drawn into cycles of exploitation involving powerful figures whose status allowed them to move through society largely unquestioned for years. The scandal was shocking not only because of the crimes themselves but because it exposed how easily women can be treated as disposable in systems where wealth and authority hold enormous sway.
Seen together these stories begin to form a pattern that stretches across continents. Our progress as women, despite the many added layers of challenge we continue to carry, is real and worth honouring. Women now lead governments, shape industries, and leave an undeniable mark on cultural life in ways previous generations could scarcely have imagined. But that progress sits alongside the hard reality that freedom remains fragile, rights can be rolled back with alarming speed, and the autonomy one woman takes for granted can be denied entirely to another.
That is why International Women’s Day cannot simply be about celebration. It must also be about questioning. Empowerment means little if it belongs only to a fortunate few. It has to reach the Afghan girl still denied a classroom, the Iranian woman fighting for bodily autonomy, the Muslim woman in Europe defending her right to dress as she chooses, the American woman navigating shrinking reproductive rights, and every survivor still seeking justice after abuse. Until dignity, safety, and self-determination belong to every woman, anywhere in the world, our celebration remains unfinished.
