Nonprofit Quarterly: Women’s Rights Under Siege—but We’ve Come Too Far to Go Back

January 7. 2026

Executive Director Noreen Farrell and Director of National Campaigns Deborah Vagins are featured in a Nonprofit Quarterly article summarizing rollbacks to U.S. women’s rights in recent years.

These attacks, argued Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), also create a climate that encourages “political violence targeting women’s rights advocates.” She cites the June 2025 assassination of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a champion of reproductive rights, as a chilling example of how anti-choice extremism can and does turn violent.

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Deborah Vagins, director of ERA’s Equal Pay Today campaign, a national coalition of more than 50 nonprofit and advocacy organizations that advocate for pay equity for women and LGBTQIA+ people, especially women of color, noted in a press statement that “these numbers show us the persistence of the devastating gender and racial wage gaps that women continue to face.”

The group’s policy agenda centers on implementing transparent pay practices and accountability mechanisms; strengthening current equal pay laws and passing new legislation to increase equity, ban workplace harassment, eliminate the subminimum wage for tipped workers and other vulnerable workers; and supporting paid family leave, paid sick and safe leave, and other workplace protections.

Farrell told NPQ that local policy can make a difference: “For the first time in 20 years, the gender gap is widening, except in states passing the kind of wage justice laws and childcare paid family benefits ERA is championing.”

Read the full article.