International Working Women’s Day 2026 Statement*

We defend life, land and dignity, and through our struggles, another world becomes possible

On this International Women’s Day, we reaffirm that gender justice cannot be separated from the broader struggle for justice in our world.

Across regions, women and marginalised gender are resisting systems that exploit land, bodies and communities. These systems are not accidental; they are rooted in patriarchy, militarism, racism, colonial legacies, corporate power, and imperialism. They shape who controls resources, who bears the burden of crisis, and whose lives are treated as unessential.

Today, as the global community marks International Women’s Day under the call for rights, justice, and action for all women and girls, we recognise that meaningful justice requires confronting the structural forces that reproduce oppressions. 

Around the world, we are witnessing the emergence of renewed forms of imperialism and colonialism that are affecting different peoples in different regions with the complicit silence of the international community. The destruction of international law impacts the most vulnerable populations, where women, black women, transgender, and gender diverse people pay the highest price.

Hard-won rights are being eroded by extreme right forces, shrinking civic space, and regressive agendas that seek to control women’s bodies, silence feminist voices, and weaken collective organising.

Women are not only among those most affected by environmental destruction, conflict, displacement, and economic injustice; they are also at the forefront of resistance. From defending land and water to sustaining communities through crisis, to challenging violence in all its forms, women environmental defenders and grassroots activists continue to build pathways toward dignity, safety, survival and system change.

Environmental devastation deepens gender injustice. When ecosystems are destroyed, it is often women who must travel further for water, struggle to secure food, and absorb the shocks of displacement and poverty. When territories are militarised or exploited, women’s bodies and livelihoods are placed at risk. When economies are shaped by extraction and inequality, care work expands while rights shrink.

A just future requires dismantling these interconnected systems of oppression. Feminist struggles for safety and equality are inseparable from movements for climate justice, land rights, self-determination and economic justice. There can be no environmental justice without gender justice, and no gender justice without confronting the global structures that sustain exploitation and violence.

On this day, we stand in solidarity with women, gender-diverse people and communities resisting oppression in all its forms. We honour the courage of those defending life, territory, and collective rights, often at great risk. Their leadership reminds us that justice is not granted from above; it is built through collective struggle.

We call on governments and international institutions to take concrete steps to:

• Protect women and gender-diverse environmental defenders and uphold human rights;
• End policies that fuel militarisation, dispossession, and genocide;
• Guarantee access to land, resources, and public policies that address inequalities and systemic violence in all its forms;
• Invest in universal care and public services;
• Ensure accountability and justice for violence against women and marginalised communities.

This International Women’s Day, we recommit to building a world grounded in solidarity, social, economic, gender and environmental justice. 

The struggle for gender justice is inseparable from the struggle for life itself, and it is a struggle we will continue together.

* FoEI uses the original name of this international day, International Working Women’s Day, to reclaim the component of dignified work that framed this struggle and the place women occupy in the world of work, recognising that the greatest share of the burden of care work and other forms of work that make life possible continues to fall overwhelmingly on women, especially Indigenous women and Afro-descendant women as well as gender-diverse people, who carry out these tasks without pay, without rights, and under conditions of increasing precariousness.

Main image: International Working Women’s Day march in Montevideo, Uruguay, 8 March 2019. Credit: Edgardo Mattioli, FoEI.