CEDAW Article 5: Requires states to change the cultural attitudes that produce discrimination
Article 5 goes underneath the law, to the attitudes that produce discriminatory law in the first place. It's the article that says: even if you fix every statute, you haven't finished, because the belief that produced the statute is still there, and it will produce another one.
What it states
Article 5 has two parts. The first requires states to take all appropriate measures to modify social and cultural patterns of conduct that are based on ideas of the inferiority or superiority of either sex, or on stereotyped roles for men and women. The second requires states to ensure family education includes proper recognition of maternity as a social function and the shared responsibility of both parents in raising children.
Neither half uses the word "law." This is the one article in the Convention's opening cluster that isn't really asking a government to legislate. It's asking a government to intervene in belief itself: what a culture treats as natural, appropriate, or simply "how things are."
The upstream article
This is the article Said Differently has been circling from a different angle, the idea that rhetoric and social patterns don't just describe discrimination, they install it as belief before it ever becomes a rule anyone can point to. Article 5 is CEDAW's version of that same recognition: gender stereotypes aren't a symptom of discriminatory law, they're the mechanism that manufactures consent for it. A country can repeal every discriminatory statute Article 2 identifies and still fail Article 5, if the underlying belief that produced those statutes is untouched, because that belief will simply produce the next law, or govern conduct in places no statute reaches at all.
Reservations
Article 5's reservation list is short; Niger, Malaysia, Micronesia, and the Cook Islands reserved its first clause directly, with France and India taking the softer route of a narrowing declaration rather than an outright reservation. A reservation is a formal act, a government has to put in writing, to the UN, exactly what it refuses to do. States reserve heavily against Article 2 and Article 16 because those articles demand specific, checkable acts: repeal this law, recognize this right. Non-compliance is visible enough that a state feels the need to pre-emptively excuse itself on paper. Article 5 asks for something far harder to pin down. Change what people believe, and there's no single statute a state has to point to and defend not repealing. Nothing forces the objection into writing, so most of it simply never gets written.
The clearest illustration is the two states you'd most expect on this list and won't find there: Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Neither reserved Article 5. Saudi Arabia's reservation is a blanket one. It declines to observe any term of the Convention that contradicts Islamic law, full stop, which already covers Article 5 without needing to name it. The UAE's reservations are narrower but land in the same place indirectly: it reserved Article 16, which governs marriage, guardianship, and divorce, the enforceable, day-to-day mechanics of the exact stereotyped roles Article 5 asks a state to dismantle. Once the law that encodes the stereotype is already shielded, there's no need to separately shield the belief behind it. The absence of a reservation to Article 5 in either case isn't evidence the underlying cultural pattern doesn't exist there. It's evidence the pattern is already protected somewhere else on the list, one level down, where it doesn't have to answer to Article 5 at all.
Niger, Malaysia, Micronesia, and the Cook Islands, by contrast, named Article 5(a) directly because nothing else in their reservation list already covered the custom they were protectingmostly hereditary title and inheritance, a narrower seam of "culture" than the sweeping religious-law reservations elsewhere in the Convention. So the real pattern across CEDAW's reservation record may be this: a state only names an article when no broader reservation elsewhere already makes it redundant to name. Read that way, a short reservation list for Article 5 isn't reassurance. It's the one article in this series where the absence of a formal objection tells you the least about whether the thing it's asking for actually happened.