At Women Deliver 2026, thousands of feminists, activists, and movement builders gathered under a shared language of transformation — inclusion, accountability, participation and change. But what happens when the words travel further than the power they promise? Feminist scholar and activist Anila Noor left the conference carrying an unexpected metaphor: a conference bag that was empty. Not as a disappointment — but as a revelation.
I left Women Deliver carrying something I did not expect. It was not just exhaustion or inspiration, but a quiet unease that lingered in my body long after the conference ended. This year’s Women Deliver Conference was a space filled with brilliance. Thousands of feminists, Indigenous leaders, youth activists, refugee women, and movement builders gathered across geographies and struggles.
The energy was undeniable, urgent, alive, and at times deeply moving. There were moments when solidarity felt tangible, almost within reach. And yet, beneath the language of transformation, I kept returning to one question: Who is power actually shifting toward?
Not who is speaking. Not who is present. But who is structurally changing outcomes? Because those are not the same thing.
The Language of Change, the Stability of Power
Across panels on feminist futures, AI, climate justice, humanitarian response, and gender-responsive financing, the vocabulary was familiar: inclusion, participation, accountability, innovation, transformation. These words now circulate easily across global feminist spaces. They travel well. They sound like progress. But the systems underneath them feel far less moved. After a while, I noticed something unsettling: the repetition of progressive language can begin to obscure the lack of structural disruption behind it. We are speaking more fluently about justice, while the architecture of decision-making remains largely intact. And it is within that contradiction that a small object became impossible to ignore.
The Empty Bag
At registration, we were given a conference bag. It was well-designed, symbolic, and even celebratory. It carried the aesthetic of opportunity. But when I opened it, it was empty.
That emptiness stayed with me not as a disappointment, but as a metaphor. Because what that bag revealed was not absence, but distribution. Some people arrive at feminist spaces and leave with networks, funding leads, institutional access, visibility, and strategic positioning. Others arrive and leave with the same structural barriers they came with only now translated into the language of empowerment.
Feminist spaces amplify voices while unevenly distributing the conditions that turn voice into power.
The bag is never actually empty for everyone.
It is filled through systems: funding, mobility, institutional legitimacy, visa access, and proximity to power. Over time, the metaphor deepened. Because the question is not only what is inside the bag. It is: who has the conditions to fill it?
If you have institutional backing, funding, mobility rights, language access, and professional networks, you leave with accumulation. If you do not, you leave with the extraction of your story, your emotional labour, and your knowledge. without structural return. This is where feminist spaces become contradictory. They amplify voices while unevenly distributing the conditions that turn voice into power.
“Participation Is Not Power.”
We celebrate participation as progress, but without authority it does not shift systems. Feminist spaces often invite people to narrate injustice without enabling them to reshape its causes. Speech becomes visible, experience consumable, while decision-making stays elsewhere. Speaking is mistaken for shaping.
At Women Deliver 2026, the gap between voice and authority was clear. Grassroots activists, refugee women leaders, and young feminists shared stories on resilience, climate, humanitarian issues, and inclusion, gaining legitimacy. But decision-making remained closed; strategic and funding talks were behind closed doors, influenced by donors and institutions. Activists had limited access to decision-makers, often just maintaining visibility, which often leads to exhaustion. This also creates dependency: feminists must constantly prove urgency for resources, turning survival into institutional labor. We're invited to speak on justice, but participation is shaped externally. It's not personal frustration but a structural reality: many grassroots and refugee feminists gain visibility without equal power, funding, or decision roles. Some tell stories, others interpret, but few decide.
The Donor Proximity Paradox
I call many invitation-only gatherings 'invisible doors' because they’re beyond our reach, despite efforts to find them. Access to these donor resource spaces was curated, requiring effort: approaching, explaining, justifying, and translating community struggles. Responses often were: 'Thank you for sharing. We will stay in touch.' A form of openness that functions as closure, not refusal or commitment, but a polite pause acknowledging urgency without action.
Collective Loss: What We Witnessed Together
What I experienced at Women Deliver was not only individual reflection. It was something shared across conversations, corridors, and informal exchanges. A collective recognition that what is often framed as “inclusion” does not automatically translate into power.
Feminist spaces are expanding in visibility, but not necessarily in redistribution of power.
It is, in many ways, a collective loss.
I spoke with feminist leaders such as Jacqueline Hart, Matcha Phorn-in, and Nimo Ahmed, among others in a gathering of more than 6,500 participants. Across different geographies and struggles, their reflections pointed to the same structural tension: feminist spaces are expanding in visibility, but not necessarily in redistribution of power.
Nimo Ahmed, a Somali refugee leader based in Indonesia, named this contradiction with clarity. She reflected that refugee women are consistently positioned at the centre of feminist narratives yet remain peripheral in decision-making structures.
Despite leading essential work in response, care, and community resilience, refugee-led organizations continue to face restricted access to direct funding and limited influence over agenda-setting processes. Her insight is sharp and difficult to ignore:
“Inclusion without redistribution produces visibility without agency.”
It is a sentence that captures not only her experience but also a broader structural pattern across global feminist governance.
Matcha Phorn-in, an Indigenous feminist from Thailand, highlighted that feminist struggles are interconnected, involving climate justice, displacement, extractivism, militarization, and gender inequality. They are not separate issues. She stressed that meaningful political work often occurs outside formal settings, in informal spaces such as corridors, gatherings, and shared meals, where trust and strategies develop. Feminist solidarity persists within and despite unequal structures.
Jacqueline Hart, a Feminist strategist, critiques the deliberate inclusion of exclusion in conference architecture through restricted spaces, geography, visas, and gatekeeping. She notes a tension: without accountability feminist conferences often reuse language and commitments but fail to transform underlying structures. These reflections are interconnected, showing that absence is purposeful, inclusion isn't neutral, and even celebrated participation can uphold hierarchies. They reinforce a key lesson: what is missing from these spaces isn't just people, but power.
Many feminist leaders are absent due to systemic barriers.
Absence isn't neutrality but a political outcome shaped by visa policies, funding barriers, and global hierarchies that filter who can join feminist spaces. Many feminist leaders are absent due to systemic barriers, not irrelevance, highlighting structural exclusion over individual gaps in action, speech, or recognition. To transform feminist spaces, focus should shift from participation to accountability: funding grassroots and refugee-led groups, shared decision-making, transparent governance, and long-term commitments. True change requires questioning power distribution and who shapes its direction, as power extends beyond presence to global philanthropy and institutions, where donor priorities and funding influence agendas before participation. Organizing often becomes a negotiation of unequal power, risking superficial inclusion over real redistribution. Participation can mask deeper inequalities: visibility without access, voice without change, recognition without redistribution; the “filled bag” remains unevenly accessible, shaped by proximity to resources, legitimacy, and institutional permission.
To advance, feminist spaces require reimagining based on shared power, responsibility, and redistribution, moving beyond extraction, branding, or conditional language. They must also surpass colonial and capitalist ideas that determine valued knowledge and labour. This isn't idealism but a necessity: if just structures are absent, they must be built.
