And the man may get off with minimal punishment by using cultural rights as a legal defense. He was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon rather than attempted murder after a defense that focused on how wives in Iran are expected to be obedient. Separate and unequal, such a legal philosphy would continue male privilege as a cultural right at the cost of women's equality. Consider Mormonism in Utah as an example of the intractability of some cultural practices. Polygamy was supposedly ended as a prerequisite for statehood, but news stories demonstrate the continued existence of the custom and how it creates conditions of violence and servitude for women.
Cultural practices survive in spite of laws if the community is large and distinct enough.
The most serious threat to women's rights as a whole is the Vatican. Many centuries of being the government of western Europe have left the Papacy with little regard for the sovereignty of mere nations. It wields influence over even non-Catholics through a combination of putative spiritual authority and hardball power politics. It particularly harms the lives of women worldwide by continually blocking voluntary family planning programs for overpopulated Third World countries where the grinding poverty would be alleviated by stabilized population growth. The Vatican has arrived at its planetary population coercion by way of enforcing its doctrine of papal infallibility.