Enhancing gender equality to counter the backlash

The new chair of the European Parliament’s FEMM committee sets an agenda on gender for this five-year term.

The process of appointing the new college of European commissioners sparked a loud controversy over the lack of gender balance. Ultimately, the returning commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, narrowly resolved it by reaching a 40 per cent female share, offset by four of the six vice-presidencies (including the first vice-president) being allocated to women. But now a new, and more crucial, battle begins—making gender equality and women’s rights central to European Union policies and regulation.

In von der Leyen’s distribution of portfolios, equality was assigned to Belgium’s foreign minister, Hadja Lahbib. But the portfolio title, ‘preparedness and crisis management; equality’—and the evidence that the crisis-management part is far more developed—made equality look subordinate. Nor was gender equality integrated as a priority in the mission letters sent to the rest of the nominated commissioners, although ‘gender mainstreaming’ will be crucial in this mandate.

The commission does not appear fully to recognise the gender backlash in Europe, and globally, nor its centrality to anti-democratic and anti-EU forces. Feminism was the most profoundly democratic movement of the 20th century and beyond and this transformative power is precisely what the ultra-conservative backlash seeks to suppress. Defending women’s rights is crucial to protect democracy and European values, amid rising populism and the resurgence of fascist movements. There is still time to correct this shortcoming in the European Parliament, whose consent to the new team is required, so that this commission can get up and running as soon as possible.

In the new five-year EU term, the agenda of the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) should prioritise:

• advancing a robust legislative agenda;
• ensuring genuine gender mainstreaming;
• guaranteeing proper implementation and evaluation of recent legislation, embracing ‘intersectionality’, and
• promoting an international alliance to counter the gender backlash.

Legislative agenda

According to the European Institute for Gender Equality’s (EIGE) index, it will take more than 60 years to achieve full equality in the EU. Despite many achievements in the previous mandate—under Helena Dalli as designated commissioner for equality—much remains to be done.

Our aim should be to create a robust framework for women’s rights across Europe. Similar to the achievements of the 2017 European Pillar of Social Rights, we need a European Charter of Women’s Rights as a fundamental element to achieve gender equality. We expect the roadmap for women’s rights which von der Leyen is to present next March to go in the right direction.

The EU and its member states must strengthen the institutional and legal framework for women’s rights and gender equality. This must be fully integrated into the EU treaties, particularly vis-à-vis sexual and reproductive rights and gender parity. We need a parity directive ensuring balanced representation in the EU’s leadership, rather than this being at the discretion of the commission president or member states.

We must continue pushing forward a legislative and policy agenda that improves the lives and opportunities of women, with greater wellbeing and liberties for all. This includes finalising the revised victims’-rights directive and the still-pending regulation on child abuse. The latter was deemed to fall to the parliament’s civil-liberties committee (LIBE). Yet FEMM must play a central role in shaping its stance: most victims are girls, 80 to 95 per cent of perpetrators are men and many studies show a strong correlation between intimate-partner and child-sexual abuse.

The European Care Strategy should evolve into a comprehensive ‘care deal’ that considers paid and unpaid work and the differences in time availability between men and women. These make for differential impacts on labour markets, culture creation and knowledge generation and are associated with women’s under-representation in power and greater poverty, particularly time poverty. As working-time reduction is being discussed in many countries and we move toward legislating for the ‘right to disconnect’ within the EU, it is crucial to address the vast disparities in how men and women get to use their time.

Less discriminatory labour markets and more inclusive educational pathways are also essential genuinely to boost the ‘competitiveness’ that is central to the new commission’s agenda, as outlined in the Draghi report. For decades, women have comprised the majority of university graduates and are more likely to have higher-education qualifications than working-age men. Yet we still experience lower economic activity and employment, more unemployment, temporary work and part-time employment, and lower wages and income, which limit our options and underutilise our talents.

Men are though affected too, particularly in higher education dropout rates and limited participation in caregiving, critical in the context of an ageing population. We should move towards a dual-earner/dual-carer household model, in which men and women at least have a real opportunity to engage equally in paid work and unpaid care.

Finally, we should also make progress in areas that we began addressing in the previous parliamentary term through non-legislative initiatives, such as women’s poverty in Europe, the representation of women in the technology-related ‘STEM’ subjects and, especially, the regulation of prostitution in the EU—its cross-border implications and impact on gender equality and women’s rights. Together with surrogacy, these practices represent the commodification and exploitation of women’s bodies, often justified by false narratives of ‘freedom’, backed by powerful economic interests with little regard for human rights, as FEMM pointed out vis-à-vis the human-trafficking directive.

Gender mainstreaming

Gender mainstreaming is essential to embed equality across all policies and throughout the political process, including budgeting and policy evaluation. This requires appropriate institutions and co-ordination, funding and expertise, but above all political will.

It is crucial that the new Gender Equality Strategy which von der Leyen has signalled is adequate for this. Gender must be fully enshrined in the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and each commission directorate should have a task force for gender equality, hiring specialist staff, with co-ordination at the highest level. European universities (except those in countries where gender studies have been unfortunately banned, such as Hungary) continue to train equality experts, who should be integrated into the EU administration.

Policy foresight and gender-sensitive evaluation are essential to challenge the tendency to treat male experiences, opportunities and perspectives as if universal. Feminist knowledge is crucial and should be promoted, particularly in the European University Alliance and through Horizon Europe. The EIGE and the Fundamental Rights Agency must have the resources they need, while a gender perspective should be reinforced in the work of EU think-tanks such as the Joint Research Centre (JRC). More gender-disaggregated and gender-specific statistics are also required from member states and Eurostat.

Gender mainstreaming should apply throughout but priorities are health, transitions (especially the digital transition) and foreign policy. Gaps in health are particularly striking.

These disparities stem not only from biases in research but from clinical trials and treatments too. We also suffer from the neglect of women’s specific health issues and processes, such as the menopause, leading to medical, workplace and social stigma. (The menopause is receiving policy attention via labour legislation in some countries outside the EU.) Sexual and reproductive rights, including access to contraception and legal and safe abortion, should be treated as human rights to be included in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, as well as a matter of public health and access to goods and services within the union.

Excessive use of anti-depressants, analgesics and sleeping pills reflects how women suffer unacknowledged social depletion from their multiple roles, while public services are eroded by deflationary fiscal policies. Issues that women experience differently must not once again be dismissed, subjected to over-medication or associated with mental ill-health or ‘hysteria’—labels historically linked with the punishment of women who deviated from societal norms.

The green, digital and demographic transitions must be pursued with social, territorial and gender justice in mind. The NextGenerationEU fund, one of the most significant achievements of the previous legislative term, was largely aimed at transforming Europe’s economies through decarbonisation and digitalisation. Although equality was a stated priority, few countries incorporated it into their plans—among them, those with more advanced gender-equality frameworks, such as Spain.

Segregation in education and labour markets may have led to men benefiting more from these funds in terms of job creation and upskilling: they are concentrated in sectors linked with decarbonisation and digitalisation. Women and girls continue to face a lack of encouragement to pursue STEM careers, while caregiving professions remain undervalued and underpaid, unappealing to men—so segregation is sustained.

We urgently need gender mainstreaming in the digital sphere particularly, where algorithms, artificial intelligence and the design of social networks are shaping the future. In this public domain where information and knowledge are linked with prestige and authority, women cannot be excluded again, as we were during the development of scientific disciplines in the 19th and much of the 20th century. This is especially so since the digital space is a battleground for cyber violence, where women and girls are targeted through sexualisation, harassment and efforts to silence our voices.

It is also essential to advance a feminist foreign policy and ensure that gender lenses are explicitly applied. The dehumanisation of women in Afghanistan and Iran speaks for itself.

Extreme violence, femicide, rape and mass sexual assault, along with lack of sexual and reproductive rights, affect women and girls in war zones and conflict areas, as well as female asylum-seekers reaching the EU. There have been reports that some service providers working under EU protocols have committed or permitted sexual assaults.

Implementation and intersectionality

The 2019-24 EU term, with a commissioner, Dalli, dedicated exclusively to equality, marked significant progress on the equality agenda. Key directives were passed, including on gender-based violence, human trafficking, pay transparency, equality bodies and women on boards. We also saw the adoption of strategies on equality, LGBT+ rights and care. These must be relaunched in this new term, with adequate resources.

In particular, the care strategy needs to be transformed to ensure that care work, which still falls predominantly on women—so unrecognised, undervalued and poorly compensated—is properly acknowledged and shared. A wider ‘care deal’ should take in social services, public goods and how work is organised and valued in enterprises and society in general.

It is equally important to ensure implementation of this new legislation. Particularly urgent is the monitoring of the directive on gender-based violence across all member states, ensuring no woman is left at risk or without access to support. Women are still being killed, raped and assaulted, simply for being women. We will continue pushing for gender-based violence to be classified as an EU crime and for rape (defined by the absence of consent) to be recognised in the directive.

When implementing these policies, it is crucial to uphold the principle of intersectionality, recognisng how different axes of inequality intersect without falling into the patriarchal trap of treating women as a ‘minority group’. There are ten million more women than men in the EU, yet legislation sometimes includes such language as ‘with particular attention to women, ethnic minorities, LGBTIQ+ people and persons with disabilities’—as if women themselves did not belong to ethnic, religious, sexual-orientation or gender-identity groups or suffer disabilities.

We must fight all forms of discrimination and address how multiple inequalities reinforce one another. But presuming the white heterosexual male to be the standard dilutes systemic gender inequality and treats everyone else—including women—as ‘others’. Understanding and acting on the realities of women, men and non-binary people in all their diversity, which began in the previous parliamentary term, must be a key focus in this one.

Gender backlash

Anti-gender politics are central to this populist moment. The ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’, which began in the 2010s, is not merely a continuation of the backlashes that have occurred every time women have gained ground—especially since the 1970s. It represents a new, co-ordinated, strategic political configuration which places anti-gender views at the forefront of the attack on democracy, with patriarchy reframed via opportunistic synergies with various hyped-up fears in a mutually reinforcing cycle.

If the ultraconservative international aims to dismantle liberal democracies and the European project, while positioning opposition to equality as a core tenet, those of us who defend democracy and the European project must make the equality agenda central to our efforts. And we cannot allow equality to be redefined for purposes unrelated to women’s rights and gender equality.

During the recent plenary session on the situation of women in Afghanistan, for instance, several MEPs condemned the dehumanisation of women, only to use this as a platform for hate speech—insinuating that gender-based violence in Europe was primarily committed by foreigners, especially ‘Muslims’. The Pelicot affair in France however tells a starkly different story: more than 50 men are alleged to have been involved in an episode symbolising the normalisation of rape culture and gender-based violence within European society—and there are so many others, including all the femicides we could add ever day.

One could engage in the black humour of concluding that including equality in a ‘crisis management’ portfolio may not be such a bad idea after all: there is a crisis of gender inequality and violence against women and the associated backlash, which must urgently be managed—in Europe and globally. But we would still need to reverse the order of priorities, bringing equality to the fore.

I wish Lahbib the best of luck navigating this very important portfolio in such a difficult moment and offer my unwavering support.