Weekend Boost No. 166

FEMINIST LEADERSHIP: WHERE WE'VE BEEN, WHERE WE'RE HEADING

Thirty years after the world gathered in Beijing to declare that women’s rights are human rights, we stand at another inflection point. Feminist movements are evolving, reshaping economies, politics, and leadership itself. Yet the question remains — are we resourcing them at the scale required for change?

This week, I’m highlighting three resources that remind us what feminist leadership looks like, how it’s being funded, and where the global movement stands today.

• What Feminist Leadership Really Means: Scholar and activist Srilatha Batliwala describes feminist leadership as a practice that challenges dominance and hierarchy, replacing them with equity, reflection, and shared power. It’s not about adding women into existing systems — it’s about transforming those systems themselves. Check out the Transformative Feminist Leadership: What It Is and Why It Matters Toolkit.

• The Moonshot: Canada’s Equality Fund: What happens when a government decides to back feminist movements — not just projects? The Equality Fund, born from Canada’s bold CAD 300 million commitment, is rewriting the rules of funding through a model that combines grants, philanthropy, and gender-lens investing. This podcast tells the inside story — how a group of visionaries turned a bold idea into a global platform for equality.
  Listen to Moonshot: Making the Equality Fund

• 30 Years After Beijing — The State of Women’s Rights: UN Women’s new 2025 report, Women’s Rights in Review: 30 Years After Beijing, traces what’s changed — and what hasn’t — since that landmark conference. The findings are both sobering and galvanizing: despite progress, only two countries have achieved gender parity in political representation, and global funding for women’s rights remains far below need.
  Read Women’s Rights in Review (2025) – UN Women

THE PRACTICE

Feminist leadership calls us not only to imagine a different future, but to practice it — in how we lead, fund, and show up for one another.

As adrienne maree brown writes, “What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”

Take a moment to reflect:
Where in my work or community can I move resources — time, attention, or influence — toward the systems and people shaping lasting equality?