Gender Equality

The 2025 funding crisis has thrown the AIDS response into turmoil with massive disruptions to HIV prevention and community led services, particularly for the most vulnerable. Community-led services, vital to reaching marginalized populations, are being deprioritized while the rise in punitive laws criminalizing same-sex relationships, gender identity, and drug use is amplifying the crisis, making HIV services inaccessible. However, the new report by UNAIDS shows evidence that resilience, investment and innovation combined with global solidarity still offer a path to end AIDS. Abrupt reductions in international HIV assistance in 2025 have deepened existing funding shortfalls. The OECD estimates that external health assistance is projected to drop by 30–40% in 2025 compared with 2023, causing immediate and even more severe disruption to health services in low- and middle-income countries. Prevention services—already under strain before the crisis—have been hit hardest. Major reductions in access medicines to prevent HIV (pre-exposure prophylaxis referred to as PrEP) and sharp declines in voluntary medical male circumcision for HIV prevention have left a growing protection gap for millions. The dismantling of HIV prevention programmes designed with and for young women have deprived adolescent girls and young women of HIV prevention, mental health, and gender-based violence services in many countries. This increases their vulnerability further—already in 2024 there were globally 570 new HIV infections every day among young women and girls aged 15—24. Community-led organizations—the backbone of the HIV response and who were able to reach people most vulnerable to HIV—report widespread closures, with more than 60% of women-led organizations suspending essential programmes. Services for key populations including men who have sex with men, sex workers, people who inject drugs and transgender people have also been severely impacted. A failure to reach the 2030 global HIV targets of the next Global AIDS Strategy could result in an additional 3.3 million new HIV infections between 2025 and 2030.

Shared responsibility and global solidarity have been the foundations on which the global HIV response has achieved its historic reductions in numbers of new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths. As we transition to a new era of solidarity, shared responsibility and global solidarity will remain essential to hopes for ending AIDS. Unless the world pulls together to overcome the growing financing, human rights and programmatic challenges confronting the HIV response, we will miss the opportunity to end AIDS as a public health threat.

At the end of 2024, the world was closer than in the past two decades to ending AIDS as a public health threat by 2030. At that point, 31.6 million of the 40.8 million (77%) [37 million–45.6 million] people living with HIV were on lifesaving treatment.

Although the impacts of funding cuts are severe, neither country governments nor communities have accepted these reductions passively. Instead, key actors at all levels are rapidly responding, developing and implementing measures to ensure the long-term sustainability of the response.

From the data collected, SMEs who had achieved or surpassed parity (with 50 percent or more women overall) were largely comparable across a range of policy areas to those SMEs who had yet to achieve parity (with less than 50 per cent women overall).

Gender equality has a transformative impact on everything from individuals to institutions and innovations in the space sector. Despite this, the space sector has many data gaps when it comes to gender equality, hampering our ability to know what to do, and how to do it, and impacting individuals’ experiences in the sector. Gender inequality in the sector has broader implications for talent retention, recruitment, and the sustainable uses of outer space. This study builds on the Phase 1 Landmark Study on Gender Equality in the Global Space Sector and the UNOOSA Space4Women Expert Meetings in the Republic of Korea, Canada, and Kenya. This report comprises two parts, launching the UNOOSA Phase 2 research into gender equality in the space sector. The first part of this report focuses on women’s experiences in the sector, while the second part provides information on gender representation in private space organizations and examines policies or interventions that advance gender equality. The purpose of both is to drive transparency, action, and progress towards equality and inclusion in humanity’s ambitions in space. Not only is this critical to the Space2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals but it is also a moral and strategic necessity.

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) expresses its sin-cere appreciation to all women who contributed to this study by sharing their time, experiences, and insights into entering and advancing within the space sector, despite the numerous challenges.

Understanding women’s experiences and representation in the space sector is vital.