Page 5 Ending Sex Discrimination in the Law EQUALITY NOW – BEIJING+25 INTRODUCTION 25 years ago Gender Equality became a global priority In 1995, at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 189 governments agreed on a comprehensive roadmap - the Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA)1 - to advance women’s and girls’ rights and achieve equality for women. As legal equality is an essential first step to achieving gender equality, one of the commitments made by States was that they would “revoke any remaining laws that discriminate on the basis of sex”. Since Beijing, public and political consensus on the global importance of respect for women’s and girls’ rights, including to equality under the law, was affirmed with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development2 by UN member states in 2015. In particular, SDG indicator 5.1.1 measures if “legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor equality and non-discrimination on the basis of sex”. Legal equality is an essential first step to gender equality Equality Now has focused efforts on getting governments to repeal laws that explicitly discriminate on the basis of sex. In our advocacy reports, Words and Deeds: Holding Governments Accountable in the Beijing+ Review Process, published in 1999, 2004, 2010 and 2015, and 2020(with a special focus on family law (see insert)), Equality Now highlights a sampling of explicitly sex discriminatory laws affecting women and girls, and their families, over the course of their lives in: •• marital status (marriage, divorce, polygamy, wife obedience); •• personal status (citizenship, weight of court testimony, travel, sexual exploitation); •• economic status (inheritance, property, employment, retirement); •• and in addressing violence against women and girls (rape, including estupro, domestic violence, “honor” killings).