Gender Apartheid

There is a concept that has been gaining traction in international debate and that should be confronting us with greater urgency: gender apartheid.

Today, its most extreme example is Afghanistan under Taliban rule. Since 2021, what we are witnessing is not merely the removal of rights, but a system that reorganizes society through the exclusion of women. The imposed rules have intensified to levels that defy any previous standard. There are restrictions that render women’s voices inaudible, control their bodies in public spaces, and are grounded in a brutal logic: that women should exist at the bare minimum required to survive, not to live fully.

In some cases, even domestic violence is tolerated within limits that reveal the degree to which inequality has been institutionalized. This is no longer about isolated deviations. It is a system. Experts already describe this scenario as a contemporary model of apartheid. Yet, it is still not fully recognized as such under international law.

And here lies the central point. The concept of apartheid originates from the regime of racial segregation institutionalized in South Africa, where the Black population was systematically deprived of rights and subjected to a legal system of domination. In response, the United Nations recognized apartheid as a crime against humanity, later consolidated by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

In other words, the world was able to legally define racial segregation as unacceptable. What is now at stake is whether there will be the same clarity when this segregation is based on gender.

But an important distinction must be made. Speaking of gender apartheid is not the same as speaking of misogyny. Misogyny is diffuse, cutting across societies and manifesting in everyday violence and inequality. Gender apartheid, on the other hand, describes an institutionalized system in which the state itself organizes the exclusion of women from public, economic, and social life. This distinction matters.

Because while Afghanistan represents today the most extreme case of this model, it does not emerge in isolation. It is connected to a broader global context of intensifying gender discrimination. Reports from Amnesty International and analyses by The Guardian point to the advancement of policies that restrict women’s rights in different countries, including Iran. In other words, what we see in Afghanistan is the extreme limit of a logic that runs across the world.

In contrast, in northern Kenya, the village of Umoja was created by women as a refuge from violence. There, men are not allowed to live. Today, it is an autonomous community, sustained by women, with its own economy and collective organization. While in some places women are erased, in others they build entire systems from their own presence.

What these extremes reveal is not merely cultural difference. It is a dispute over how power is organized.

The world does not have a peripheral problem of women’s rights. It has a structural problem in the architecture of power based on gender. Naming gender apartheid is making it visible. And making it visible is the first step toward accountability.

Between erasure and radical autonomy, there is an ongoing dispute. And perhaps the question is not only what is happening to women around the world—but what kind of world we are allowing to exist.