The year 2021 dawned as a critical period of transition and reconfiguration, as women worldwide spearheaded the grueling process of global recovery while enduring the long-tail economic and physical effects of a multi-year crisis.
Standing at the intersection of public safety, economic restructuring, and social reform, women acted as the primary anchors of a shifting global order. It was a year characterized by a fierce determination to rebuild fractured systems while demanding a fundamentally more equitable normal.
Within the landscape of employment and labor economics, the global workforce experienced a profound reckoning regarding the status of female professionals. Following the devastating job losses of the prior year, 2021 saw the rise of the "Great Resignation," a movement heavily driven by women who refused to return to low-wage, inflexible positions that failed to support working mothers.
Women aggressively advocated for remote work protections, pay transparency laws, and subsidized childcare, fundamentally shifting the corporate power dynamic.
Even as corporate glass ceilings persisted, history was made at the highest institutional levels as Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala took office as the first female Director-General of the World Trade Organization, and Kamala Harris was officially inaugurated as the first female Vice President of the United States, placing women at the apex of global economic and political policy.
Concurrently, women's physical and mental health took center stage as a matter of urgent public policy and individual survival. The prolonged strain of managing remote schooling, domestic labor, and high-exposure frontline jobs led to unprecedented rates of burnout, prompting a massive cultural shift toward destigmatizing mental health.
This was brought to the absolute forefront of global consciousness when athletic icons like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka prioritized their psychological well-being over elite competition, rewriting the rules of sports culture.
In terms of physical health, women navigated the massive global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines - a historic scientific triumph heavily led by female immunologists - while continuously fighting against rising maternal mortality rates and severe disruptions to routine reproductive healthcare worldwide.
This focus on internal health deeply informed a parallel evolution within women's spirituality and collective resilience. In the face of intense societal displacement and collective grief, women increasingly turned inward and toward one another, redefining spiritual community outside traditional, rigid boundaries.
This manifested in a surging global interest in holistic mindfulness, ancestral healing, earth-based practices, and inclusive ministries that actively rejected patriarchal structures.
Rather than serving as an isolationist escape from a difficult reality, spirituality in 2021 acted as a vital energetic engine for social activism, providing the precise psychological grounding and moral fortitude required to endure systemic oppression, process deep loss, and foster profound community healing.
Beyond these domains, the year was marked by massive sociopolitical upheavals where women stood on the front lines of defense. The abrupt withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan plunged millions of Afghan women and girls into an immediate crisis, stripping them of their right to education and employment, yet they bravely took to the streets in protest against the return of oppressive regime rules. The regime progressively dismantled decades of social progress by implementing sweeping mandates that effectively erased women from public life, creating what international observers classify as a system of gender apartheid.
This regression struck its most devastating blow against education, making Afghanistan the only country in the world to officially ban girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade and completely prohibit women from entering or teaching at universities. Beyond the erasure of their schooling, women were stripped of their economic autonomy through comprehensive bans on working for non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international entities, and private businesses.
These restrictions culminated in severe limitations on basic personal freedoms, including strict enforcement of full-body coverings, mandatory male guardians (mahram) for travel, and a total ban from public spaces like parks, gyms, and beauty salons. The suppression reached an unprecedented peak with a sweeping morality law enacted in August 2024, which legally criminalized the sound of a woman's voice speaking or singing in public, finalizing a near-total institutional confinement of women to their homes.
The global "Me Too" movement continued to yield structural accountability as high-profile legal victories penalized powerful abusers, and activists globally pushed for harsher laws against digital harassment and non-consensual deepfakes.
Overall in 2021 was a year defined by an extraordinary reclamation of agency, where women transitioned from merely surviving a global crisis to actively rewriting the rules of health, labor, and spiritual solidarity for the future.
Sixteen defining moments for gender equality in 2021 UN Women - December 22, 2021
As 2021 comes to a close, we're taking a look back at some of the major moments for gender equality and women's rights from the past 12 months. From women at the forefront of the ongoing fight against COVID-19, to new laws to support survivors of gender-based violence, from women in the highest political offices to eliminating gender stereotypes in advertising, join us in celebrating some of the small and big strides for gender equality in 2021.
Gender equality, also known as sexual equality or equality of the sexes, is the state of equal ease of access to resources and opportunities regardless of gender, including economic participation and decision-making; and the state of valuing different behaviors, aspirations, and needs equally, regardless of gender.
See 2021 through the eyes of 12 women photographers CNN - December 30, 2021
This year, As Equals, CNN's global gender reporting team, has endeavored to resist reactionary reporting. We've slowed right down. Our journalism has sought not just to report or describe what is happening to women and gender non-conforming people around the world, but to explore why various oppressions and inequalities persist - and why, in some cases, they are getting worse. Photography has been an essential tool for us in doing this work, but in an image-saturated world, and in industries - journalism and, more specifically, photojournalism - that are still dominated by men, it is important to continue to question what it is we need to see and who gets to capture the world that we see. This photo gallery, produced in collaboration with Women Photograph, helps to broaden what we think of as news stories worth telling, and gives a platform to more women storytellers and image makers.
Women around the world share lessons learned during the pandemic CNN - January 4, 2021
To mark International Women's Day, we asked women around the world what lessons they've learned during the pandemic that could help other women in the year ahead.