‘Gender apartheid’: Why we can’t forget the women of Afghanistan

March 5, 2026 — 4:30pm

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Inspirational speeches over breakfast, long lunches, networking events, fun runs. If you’re female and have a social media account, your feed is likely inundated with upcoming events for International Women’s Day on March 8.

What you probably won’t see is the women the world forgot. All 21 million of them.

For the women of Afghanistan, there’ll be no fun runs (women are banned from playing sport and visiting parks); no singing or dancing (also banned); no public speeches (women’s voices are forbidden from being heard in public); and, like every other day since 2021, there’ll be no high school for girls.

Instead, it will be another day living under what the United Nations calls a “gender apartheid”.

It’s been almost five years since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan and embarked on its ruthless campaign to systematically erase women from public life.

It’s banned most women from working, made them subject to the control of their male guardians, and inflicted inhumane punishments such as flogging for so-called “moral crimes” like adultery.

If you thought things couldn’t get much worse, recent reports show there is no limit to the Taliban’s cruelty. Under a decree issued in January, men will be permitted to beat their wives as long as it does not cause “broken bones or open wounds”, the UK’s Telegraph newspaper has reported. Even in cases where a perpetrator is convicted of causing serious injury, the maximum sentence would be 15 days in prison. Meanwhile, a woman who goes to her relatives’ home without her husband’s permission faces up to three months in prison, the report states.

You can call it shocking, terrifying, abhorrent, but which adjectives can really convey the full horror and fear that Afghan women must live with every day?

It may be almost impossible for most of us to imagine that in 2026, women are forced to endure this kind of existence. But from the safety of her home in Sydney, Nellab Hotaki Talash has no problem imagining what her life – and her daughters’ lives – would now be like, had they not escaped Afghanistan.

Unspeakable violence against girls and women meets global silence

Virginia HausseggerCanberra writer and an academic advocate for gender equity.

Canberra writer and an academic advocate for gender equity.

Almost four years have passed since I first met Nellab, who was one of about 270 female judges in Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover. She told me the terrifying story of how she fled Afghanistan, coming face-to-face with an armed rapist she had sentenced to prison for 18 years. As her three young children played in the next room, she spoke of her fears that she and her family would be killed.

Since moving to Australia, Nellab has got her driver’s licence, is studying English and hopes to begin a law degree next year so that she can reclaim the career she was forced to give up. Last week, she told me how some days, her eldest daughter says she wants to be a pilot. Other days, it’s a doctor. Nellab spoke of the “beautiful hope” she has for the future. But her mind is often back in her homeland.

Friends and relatives regularly call with frightening updates from Afghanistan, where there have been reports of women being raped and tortured in prisons after being arrested for crimes such as begging, and of women detained for allegedly violating strict dress codes. With high school banned for girls, Nellab’s friends’ teenage daughters are mostly confined to their homes, afraid to go outside. Her niece was studying to be a doctor, but she too is now stuck at home after women were banned from universities. This, in a country in the grip of a devastating humanitarian crisis with a dire shortage of healthcare workers.

The international community’s efforts to put a stop to the Taliban’s appalling treatment of women has so far proven vastly ineffective. Australia announced in 2024 that it would join Canada, Germany and the Netherlands in taking the Taliban to the International Court of Justice over its treatment of women. In July 2025, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for two Taliban leaders on charges of gender persecution. And yet the Taliban’s crackdown has only intensified since then.

“Things are getting worse with every passing day and there seems to be nothing the world can do to pressure them or take action to reverse the laws they have imposed,” says Zahra Nader, editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a media organisation with a network of mostly women journalists in Afghanistan. She says the new decree is equivalent to “treating women like slaves”.

While much of the world’s attention has moved onto other crises and some countries have even begun to normalise relations with the Taliban, brave women like the reporters who work for Zan Times continue to expose shocking human rights abuses.

“They are covering the loss of their own rights and freedom. They are being the voice of women in their country,” Zahra says of her colleagues in Afghanistan. “It’s hard to keep hoping and dreaming … but what choice do they have?”

When Zan Times advertised a journalism fellowship recently, it received 860 applications. That’s 860 women willing to risk their lives to tell the world about the horrors unfolding in their country.

“What these women are saying is that, ‘We know if the Taliban find us, we will be punished, but this is a way of speaking up … we are being the voice of truth’,” Zahra says. “Most of them said, ‘I want to stand up and fight’.”

Convincing the Taliban to do away with their barbaric laws may not be easy, but surely the international community must not give up on finding ways to help the world’s most vulnerable women.

Zahra is adamant about the message she wants to deliver on International Women’s Day. “I want people around the world to understand that Afghanistan is the forefront of women’s rights,” she says, “and if you are not standing up for that, I think all of us are losing.”

Liz Gooch is a journalist, editor and documentary producer who has worked in the US, across Asia and Australia. She now lives in Newcastle, NSW.

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