Five years of EU gender equality — hits and misses

According to the report, the gap between women and men is also damaging the world’s economies, as closing the gap could increase global gross domestic product by more than 20 percent.

At EU level, the overall picture for women is brighter, but also shows mixed results, with some indicators showing improvement, such as women’s participation in employment, while others, such as gender segregation in the labour market, show no progress over the last decade.

With the EU’s current legislative period drawing to a close with the elections in June, EUobserver had a closer look at the last five years of gender policy — has the EU been ambitious enough in achieving gender equality? What were the main hits and misses? And where should work continue in the next term?

Feminist von der Leyen

"The von der Leyen commission has been the commission which has given the most political input for gender equality," Constanza Hermanin, an academic researching on gender issues at the European University Institute (EUI), told EUobserver.

The commission president even made gender equality part of her opening speech to the parliament in 2019, when she promised to add violence against women to the list of EU crimes and asked member states to propose enough female commissioners to ensure gender equality in her own team.

"In the years before, we didn’t have much progress from a legislative point of view," Hermanin added, citing the creation of an EU commissioner for equality [Helena Dailli] as a big kickstart — although the main driver of what was achieved was the equality task force, not the commissioner’s work, Hermanin pointed out.

Since then, the EU has delivered key legislation such as the women on boards directive, the work-life balance directive, the pay transparency directive, the violence against women directive (which has yet to be formally adopted), and the EU’s accession to the Istanbul Convention.

Already last year, the proportion of women on the boards of the largest listed companies in the EU reached an all-time high of 33 percent, mainly due to legislative measures and gender quotas, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE).

By way of comparison, the proportion of women on boards in countries with no gender balance measures was 19 percent.

"I think it has been an active legislature in this area," Left MEP Eugenia Rodríguez Palop told EUobserver, while stressing that the exclusion of rape as a crime in the EU directive on violence against women was the most notorious failure of this mandate.

"This idea that we don’t have a common definition of harassment in the workplace and rape is a super miss, and I think the commission and the parliament didn’t stand up enough," Hermanin commented.

The omissions were deeply regretted by leading MEPs themselves, as well as by civil society organisations, which criticised the opposition of member states such as France and Germany — but for the Spanish leftwing MEP, gender policy should be seen in a broader context.

"We need to look at where we have come from, which is the total absence of gender policies, and also where we are going," she argued, referring to the denial of gender-based violence, and the rise of the anti-feminist far right.

Recent polls are predicting a sharp shift to the right after the upcoming EU elections in June, and gender policies could take a back seat during the next five years.

"It might be smart for the next commission to act more via funding and other kind of initiatives rather than having a lot of legislation passed into parliament because parliament may water it down," Hermanin said.

But don’t call it ‘regulatory fatigue’

"I wouldn’t call it regulatory fatigue, because that happens when there’s a lot of legislation, and there hasn’t been that much legislation," said Hermanin.

When it comes to political decision-making, for example, there is no EU legislation like there is for women on company boards, so "progress is slow", said Jolanta Reingarde, senior researcher at EIGE.

In Cyprus and Hungary, the proportion of women in their parliaments was 14 percent in 2022, and EU progress in this area is largely driven by national quotas and legislative measures in some other member states.

"If other countries don’t catch up, progress will stop," Reingarde warned.

The situation is similar when considering the time spent by women in unpaid care work, where there is only a non-legislative initiative — at a cost of €242bn a year in lost earnings due to this imbalance in care responsibilities.

"There is a lack of men and institutions to work simultaneously and in parallel in the world of care and in the world of work," said Rodríguez Palop.

However, after the increase in the number of legislative proposals in the last parliament, the next one "will shift from proposing new regulations to actually looking at implementation," Reingarde admits.

EIGE’s analysis shows that the links between gender equality and the Green Deal policy areas have not been made in a very "comprehensive" way, which risks widening gender inequalities or, at best, simply perpetuating them.

And part of the problem of not mainstreaming gender or analysing the impact of policies on women is the lack of data or disaggregated indicators.

EIGE’s latest index found that in 2023 the EU made the biggest improvement in the last ten years of measurement, while highlighting that the picture is nuanced and important challenges remain for the next decade.

"In 10 years’ time, I would expect to see greater progress in closing the pay gap, the care gap and gender segregation in the labour market," EIGE’s analyst concluded.