Report: Reframing Europe’s Gender Equality Strategy for 2026–2030

One week before the European Commission presents its new Gender Equality Strategy for 2026–2030, Forbidden Colours & Heinrich Böll Foundation European Union | Global Dialogue publishes a timely assessment of the outgoing framework and what must come next.

In Defending Equality in an Age of Democratic Decline: Reframing Europe’s Gender Equality Strategy for 2026–2030, Rémy Bonny analyses the achievements and structural weaknesses of the 2020–2025 Strategy. While important legal progress was made, including on pay transparency, corporate board representation and EU accession to the Istanbul Convention, these advances often depended on sustained political pressure rather than on the Strategy’s own capacity to withstand backlash.

The report argues that the political environment has fundamentally shifted. Gender equality has become one of the central fault lines in Europe’s democratic crisis, targeted by organised anti-rights movements and increasingly entangled with broader struggles over rule of law, digital regulation and democratic resilience. Yet the previous Strategy failed to anticipate this confrontation, most notably through its silence on abortion and its limited integration into the EU’s democracy and security frameworks.

As the Commission prepares its next Strategy, the question is no longer how to mainstream gender equality more efficiently but how to defend it politically. The 2026–2030 framework must recognise gender equality as a core pillar of democratic resilience and equip the European Union, its member states and civil society to protect it accordingly.