20 years on: what's changed for women since Hillary Clinton's Beijing speech?

Today marks 20 years since Hillary Clinton, the former US secretary of state and 2016 presidential candidate, delivered her historic Beijing speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women.

“It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights,” Clinton said in 1995. “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, it is that human rights are women’s rights ... and women’s rights are human rights. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely, and the right to be heard.”

While Clinton was talking about women’s rights violations all around the world – women killed over the size of their dowries, women raped during wars, women sterilized against their will, babies killed because they were female – she also made sure to highlight the plight of women back at home in the US.

As an American, I want to speak up for women in my own country – women who are raising children on the minimum wage, women who can’t afford healthcare or childcare, women whose lives are threatened by violence, including violence in their own homes.

Now, 20 years later, has anything changed?

Women in politics

During the 104th session of US Congress, which ran from 1995 to 1997, 50 women were elected into the 435-member House of Representatives and nine into the 100-seat Senate.

Today, during the 114th session of Congress, there are 104 women who have been elected to represent American voters – 84 in the House and 20 in the Senate. That is still only 19% of the House and 20% of the Senate. The United States population is 50.8% female.

Kristin Gillibrand, a US senator from New York, wrote on Friday that she was inspired by Clinton’s speech in 1995 to pursue her dreams of being a US senator.

“I decided that if I were truly going to make a difference in my community and on the issues I cared about, then I needed to become engaged in government,” she wrote at the Huffington Post.

Women in the boardroom

Twenty years ago, there were no female CEOs at any of the Fortune 500 companies. Today, there are 26 of them. Out of 500.

The numbers are slightly better when it comes to women sitting in corporate boardrooms. In 1995, 9.6% of board members of Fortune 500 companies were women. In 2013, that number reached 16.9%.

Women in the labor force

The women’s labor participation rate has gone down in the last 20 years - from 58.9% in 1995 to 57.2% in 2013.

The number of women in the workforce has gone up - in 2012, there were 72.6m million women in the workforce compared to 56.8 million women in 1990 – but the number of women in the US has also gone up during this time. Between 1990 and 2010 the US population grew from 249 million people, 52% of whom were women, to 309 million, 50.8% of whome were women.

Women’s pay

There might be more women in the workforce, but they are still getting paid less than men.

In 1992, women earned 71 cents for every dollar paid to men. Black women earned 65 cents and Latinas 54 cents for every dollar that men did. And while, on average, by 2013, US women earned 78 cents for every dollar that men did, women of color were still left behind. That same year, black women were still paid only 64 cents and Latinas only 56 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, according to the the National Women Law Center.

Domestic violence

In 1995, 1,252 women ages 18 and older were killed by an intimate partner, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That same year, more than 1.3 million were physically assaulted, more than half a million were stalked and more than 200 thousand were raped by their intimate partners.

According to the Bureau of Justice, non-fatal domestic violence committed by intimate partners in the US declined 67% from 1994 to 2012. The CDC no longer gives comparable figures, breaking down offences over a lifetime rather than a year today. In 2010, it reported that one in every 17 women had experienced “rape, physical violence and/or stalking by an intimate partner in the [last] 12 months”.