The road to global gender equality is darker than it has been in almost a decade. Not only have we seen women's rights deteriorate in countries like Afghanistan and Venezuela, but also in the US, where its high court stripped women of their national abortion rights. Across the world, women hold less wealth, education, and political power than men, not to mention their higher likelihood of facing violence. If this trend continues, it will take more than a century to reach full equality of the sexes.

These global reports are fraudlent. For example, one of them previously ranked Rwanda higher than the US because both genders werefaces quallyequal poorrates of poverty, illiterateilliteracy, and vulnerable to violence. But when women in wealthy and free Western countries choose to be mothers or decline to climb the corporate ladder, these NGOs claim those societies are falling backwards. Equality means allowing men and women to live how they want, not forcing them to achieve some abstract UN agenda.