This Is How Far Women's Rights Have Come In 20 Years

In 1995, world leaders signed a landmark women's rights agreement. Lots has happened since then.

Twenty years ago, global governments met in Beijing to talk about women's rights. They signed an ambitious and wide-reaching Platform for Action.

The platform had 199 action items on it. They haven't all been accomplished, but a lot has changed in two decades — starting with perceptions. "Twenty years ago, nobody cared about these issues," said Yasmeen Hassan, global executive director of Equality Now. "If you brought them up you were seen as somebody 'out there.' Now these things have gone mainstream.

"Yes life is not perfect and sexist attitudes exist at every level," Hassan said. "but we've taken huge first steps."

Today, more than 130 countries have gender equality laws. Nearly 120 have laws against sexual harassment. Nearly 80% of the countries where female genital cutting has long been practiced today have laws against it.

Here's just a sample of things women can do now that they couldn't do 20 years ago.

In France, women can now work at night.

A French law from 1892 banned women from working at night. The ban wasn't abolished by the French parliament until 2000.

In Costa Rica, women can press charges against rapists — and rapists can't get out of prosecution by offering to marry their victims.

Until 2007, rapists in Costa Rica could evade prosecution if they said they'd marry their victims — even if the victims themselves refused.

Guatemala, Peru, Uruguay, Ethiopia, and — just last year —Morocco have also changed their laws so that rapists can't get away with rape by marrying their victims.

In Rwanda, women can inherit property.

In 1999, Rwanda gave women the right to inherit land, but it was only 10 years ago that Rwanda, considered by many a model on women's rights, gave women equal rights to land ownership and sale.

In Jordan, women can now get a reduced sentence for killing their cheating husbands — like men have gotten for millennia if they murder their adulterous wives.

In the wake of protests over honor killings, Jordan's penal code was amended in 2001 to extend the softened sentences to women, too.

Still, this is one of those times gender equality isn't exactly progress.

Women can press charges against their husbands for marital rape in Malaysia.

"Having sexual access to your wife in marriage was seen as an essential part of marriage," said Hassan, of Equality Now. "That's why people married: to have sex with women for free."

Marital rape has also been outlawed in Papua New Guinea, Serbia & Montenegro, and Tonga.

In India, on the other hand, the law practically goes out of its way to allow rape in marriage. After the gang rape and murder of a young woman in New Delhi in 2012, an independent committee recommended changes to the rape law, but the recommendation to criminalize marital rape was rejected.

In Uganda, women can divorce unfaithful husbands.

The 2004 Constitutional Court decision extending to women the same rights men had to divorce an unfaithful spouse was also the first time the court used the gender equity language in Uganda's constitution to strike down a law that discriminated against women.

In Indonesia, women can have their husbands charged for beating them.

A 2004 law Indonesian outlaws "violence in the home" but here, as in so many countries, implementation lags.

In Suriname, women can pass their nationality on to their children.

But there's still a boatload of restrictions on a woman's ability to extend citizenship to her children, and even her husband, in dozens of countries around the world.

H/t Equality Now and its 2015 report on sex discrimination in laws around the world.

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