Written by Ionel Zamfir.
8 March, International Women’s Day, is a good opportunity to take stock of progress and challenges for women’s rights and gender equality. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, adopted in 1995, at the fourth World Conference on Women, by 189 states and the EU itself. The Platform is a broad and ambitious international agenda to achieve women’s rights and gender equality. The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women’s 69th session in New York will assess progress on the agenda from 10 to 21 March 2025. Regional reports that feed into this assessment, including one on Europe, show that despite progress on numerous indicators, much still remains to be done to achieve all the objectives.
Gender equality is one of the European Union’s fundamental values and guiding principles. The Union is empowered by its treaties to combat sex-based discrimination, as well as to pursue gender equality through all its policies. Long a relatively consensual basis for EU policymaking, gender equality has become the focus of renewed political controversy. Women’s rights and equality with men in public and professional life as overarching principles remain broadly uncontested, but points of view increasingly diverge on how to conceptualise gender equality, and on what the priorities for political action and the best policy tools to achieve these should be.
Besides the slow pace of progress and the fragmentation of political consensus on gender equality, there are new challenges and opportunities stemming from ongoing political, social, economic and technological developments. Trends such as the rise of new digital technologies and more recently artificial intelligence (AI), social debate on the meaning of gender roles, or increased awareness of the EU’s demographic crisis, define a new social and political context in which women’s rights need to be reaffirmed. Most pressing issues include:
Violence against women remains a widespread problem in the EU. One in ten women has experienced physical and/or sexual violence, including threats, at least once in the last five years. Women suffer physical or psychological violence at home, at work or on the street. Thus, almost 13 % of working women have endured sexual harassment at work in the last five years, while 7 % have been stalked in the same period.
Most concerning is that violence against women still fails to receive enough social recognition, and public authorities, including police and judiciary still fail to provide an adequate response. This deprives women of their most basic human rights and discourages many to disclose the violence. Only one in six women victims reports violence, including sexual violence, to the police. One third of victims never talk about it to anyone. To address these issues, the EU has adopted a new EU directive, expected to reinforce the protection of victims and raise awareness.
Today, violence against women also occurs online, with cyberviolence often aimed at women. Digital technologies have a dual impact on violence: they can act as an empowering medium for denouncing gender-based violence but equally can provide perpetrators with dangerous tools. Artificial intelligence itself poses new risks of cyberviolence against women, amplifying the ease, speed and anonymity of its dissemination. It also presents opportunities to combat it, such as by detecting sexist and misogynist speech, as well as acts of cyberviolence against individual women – a potentially important use of the EU Digital Services Act, which requires operators of large platforms to take down abusive content. Social media has been instrumental in hosting campaigns to disclose violence against women, and sexual violence in particular. They have also spread anti-feminist and misogynistic ideas to large audiences, and facilitated public abuse against individual women, particularly those active in public affairs, such as politics.
Women in politics: Women continue to be under-represented at all levels of political decision-making, as well as in political parties in the EU, despite continuous progress. The 2024 elections for the European Parliament were the first in the history of direct elections to the Parliament in which the share of women among Members fell slightly – despite two countries’ delegations having more women than men…!
The progress achieved in women’s political representation in Europe was made possible by a varied toolbox of legislative and voluntary measures (including quotas). Where there are no binding quotas, progress remains vulnerable to shifts in the political landscape and culture.
Women at work: In terms of educational performance, women have caught up with men with remarkable speed in many fields, including medicine, law, business and marketing, and various sciences, but they continue to face disadvantages on the labour market. Horizontal and vertical segregation continues to characterise labour markets. Women are over-represented in lower-paying services and care sectors and simultaneously severely under-represented in technology and engineering, and particularly in digital technologies. New EU legislation aims to reduce the pay gap for equal work, and to ensure fairness for women competing for positions of economic leadership.
The difficulties women experience in reconciling their professional ambitions with family life are one of the factors behind low birth rates in the EU. Existing EU legislation aims to improve balance between these two spheres of life, including for men who can become more involved in raising their children. Through various EU funded programmes, the European Commission has sought to promote a more egalitarian understanding of gender roles from early childhood. This can facilitate a fairer sharing of the burden of care in the family and combat discriminatory stereotyping that confines women to the home.
The EU is going through an undeniable demographic crisis, but a boost in fertility cannot come at the expense of women’s rights and gender equality. The European Parliament has opposed the reinterpretation and refocusing of gender equality policy in terms of ‘motherhood policy’, and has repeatedly expressed full support for women’s right to choose when to have children. The EU has developed a broad set of policies to address the demographic crisis.
Related EPRS publications:
- EPRS At a Glance Women’s rights: What is at stake?, February 2025
- EPRS Briefing, Cyberviolence against women in the EU, December 2024
- EPRS Briefing, EU gender equality policy: Beneficial for both women and men, November 2024
- EPRS Briefing, Violence against women active in politics in the EU: A serious obstacle to political participation, February 2024
- For more EPRS publications related to women rights and gender equality, see ‘Gender equality across policy areas’, Topical Digest, March 2025
The central task of the Members Research Service is to ensure that all Members of the European Parliament are provided with analysis of, and research on, policy issues relating to the European Union, in order to assist them in their parliamentary work.