There have been recent—and significant—setbacks to various Sustainable Development Goals, including particularly those relating to eliminating hunger, reducing poverty and creating greater economic diversification. These have been strongly gender-differentiated in their gender impacts, with substantially worse implications for women and girls, which have in turn reversed progress on the SDG on reducing gender inequality. These setbacks and reversals are commonly ascribed to recent global shocks, some of which could be seen as exogenous such as the Covid-19 pandemic and its impacts, to the Ukraine War and the associated rise in global food and fuel prices; and some that can be seen as generated by economic dynamics, particularly the fiscal and monetary policies of the rich advanced economies. These have certainly been significant in unleashing forces that have made conditions worse in many poor countries. However, this was possible only because of a broader global context in which the international financial system and the legal architecture underpinning it, operated against the socio- economic rights of people across the world, and especially women. In this paper I describe some of the ways in which this has occurred and continues to occur.