Changes from plenary report to adopted text

▸11 unchanged paragraphs

49. Highlights the importance of ensuring access to quality education for girls as a precondition for gender equality, women’s empowerment and full enjoyment of their rights; urges the Commission to ensure gender- and age-inclusive access to all levels of education and training promoting gender equality and dismantling gender stereotypes and harmful societal norms and to especially support the most vulnerable women, girls and persons faced with intersectional discrimination in their education journey; urges the Commission to ensure that the Union of Skills addresses gender imbalances, with the aim of empowering all individuals across the EU;

50. Urges the Commission to invest in the professional development of educators to better combat gender stereotypes throughout childhood and adult education, vocational education and training, on-the-job training, in all formal and non-formal learning educational pathways and to provide publishers with guidelines on eliminating gender bias in educational materials; calls on the Commission to encourage mandatory training programmes for everyone working in the education sector, including informal education and volunteers, as well as safe infrastructure, confidential reporting mechanisms and disciplinary actions;

51. Calls on the Commission to recognise consent-based, comprehensive, scientifically accurate and age-appropriate sexuality and relationship education founded on human rights and gender equality as a key part of breaking down gender stereotypes and addressing harmful behaviours and to develop EU guidelines for such education for Member States; notes that the aim should be to equip young people with knowledge about bodily autonomy, healthy relationships, reproductive health and the prevention of GBV and discrimination; stresses the importance of protecting minors online from violent and harmful pornographic content;

52. Urges the Commission and the Member States to take measures to reduce the gender gap, particularly in the STEM, AI and digital sectors, by promoting an integrated strategy to strengthen women’s and girls’ education from an early age in these sectors; stresses that such a strategy should include initiatives aiming at motivating women and girls to enter STEM pathways, and calls on the Commission to ensure women’s equal access to vocational training courses, internships and awareness-raising courses in these subjects by promoting training and lifelong learning, disseminating successful and inclusive educational best practices, promoting women role models and encouraging women to acquire knowledge and develop the skills essential for them to have equal access to job opportunities in emerging fields such as the digital sector, the green transition and in the economy and business in general and to prioritise diversity and inclusion in STEM; notes that equally boys should be encouraged to enter the EHW (education, health and welfare) sector; underlines that digital technology and platforms are becoming key in the overall process of providing education and training for women and girls as well as in many work selection processes; regrets the negative impacts of unequal access to technology, which may hinder the development of women’s and girls’ digital literacy; calls on the Commission to ensure that women and girls in all their diversity are not disproportionately affected by lack of access to technology;

53. Calls on the Commission to maintain and continue to develop a zero tolerance policy vis-à-vis all forms of GBV in the digital environment; recalls that non-consensual sharing of intimate material, including deepfakes, cyber stalking, cyber harassment and cyber incitement to violence or hatred (hate speech) are criminalised under Directive (EU) 2024/1385 on combating violence against women and domestic violence and definitions of these criminal offences should be properly implemented by Member States’ national laws; calls for enhanced EU-wide cooperation in detecting and prosecuting digital gender-based offences, such as cyber harassment and non-consensual dissemination of manipulated media; highlights the need for cross-border digital forensic capacity and judicial training; calls on the Commission to further monitor, and develop policy regarding other types of online GBV, especially targeting girls and LGBTQI+ youths;

54. Calls on the Commission to embed preventive measures and safeguards across all areas of digital policy, with particular attention to gender equality, GBV, and human rights, as well as the protection of minors online; urges the Commission to ensure full enforcement of the risk assessment and mitigation obligations under existing instruments such as the DSA, including its code of conduct, and the Artificial Intelligence Act while also developing new policy proposals, for example under the European democracy shield and the digital fairness act; calls for public scrutiny of annual risk assessments related to GBV and of mitigation measures introduced by very large online platforms (VLOPs) and very large online search engines (VLOSEs) to facilitate research and better understanding of the phenomenon;

55. Calls on the Commission to pay particular attention to the ways in which algorithms may reproduce and amplify sexist or degrading content, by imposing greater transparency and by isolating AI-generated data by gender in order to identify patterns of discrimination; urges the Commission and the Member States to establish policies and implement educational and awareness-raising programmes aimed at preventing, recognising and responding to GBV, especially among young people; calls on the Commission to invest in research that tracks gender equality in media and digital industries, including with an intersectional perspective;

Reconciliation of private and professional life and addressing gender inequalities in care provision

56. Calls on the Commission to operationalise the right to care and to be cared for as recognised in Principle 18 of the European Pillar of Social Rights; stresses that care work must be recognised, remunerated and supported, including as a public good, and calls for the establishment of high-quality, affordable and accessible care systems that ensure dignity for both care recipients and care workers;

57. Calls therefore on the Commission to develop the European Care Strategy into a comprehensive European Care Deal, addressing both formal and informal carers (predominantly women in both cases), equipped with binding legislative and financial tools for investing in and ensuring universal access to affordable and high-quality childcare, educational after-school programmes and long-term care services; reiterates that the Care Deal should be a rights based approach to care, and the financing of care infrastructure should be done through progressive taxation and public provision; emphasises the need for EU and national policies for informal carers aiming for financial support and respite, training, inclusion in pension and health systems in order to mitigate the adverse effects of caregiving on women’s careers and economic independence; calls on the Commission to increase investments to improve working conditions and health and safety in the care sector, in which the majority of workers are women;

58. Calls on the Commission to facilitate legal pathways to formalise the status of female migrant care workers who are disproportionately affected by intersectional discrimination, to recognise their qualifications and acknowledge their important contributions to care systems in the EU, to provide access to quality jobs in line with the forthcoming quality-jobs roadmap and to ensure fair working conditions for them, promoting equal opportunities within the care sector;

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Removed59. Calls on the Commission to set specific quantitative targets under the European Care Deal, including a goal of dedicating at least 2 % of EU GDP to care services by 2030, with binding national objectives and regular monitoring to ensure progress towards accessible, affordable and publicly funded, high-quality care services, with specific attention paid to low-income households and single-parent families;

Added59. Calls on the Commission to urge Member States to ensure the prompt and full transposition of the Work-Life Balance Directive and the measures it includes; further calls on the Commission to establish the robust enforcement, monitoring and annual reporting mechanisms envisaged in the directive and where necessary, to initiate infringement proceedings or other enforcement measures to secure full compliance and to allocate dedicated funding under the next MFF, and to propose a recommendation for EU-level quality standards for long-term care services, including staffing, training and quality assurance; calls on the Commission to review the Work-Life Balance Directive to ensure it is fit for purpose, to strengthen it by further developing and expanding maternity, paternity and shared parental care leave, and improving incentives for the second parent to take parental leave, further protecting parents and facilitating the combination of paid employment and caregiving responsibilities; urges the Commission to extend paid maternity and paternity leave periods across Member States, promote non-transferable parental leave, and adopt measures to redistribute caregiving responsibilities within households and between the state and families;

Removed60. Calls on the Commission to urge Member States to ensure the prompt and full transposition of the Work-Life Balance Directive and the measures it includes; further calls on the Commission to establish the robust enforcement, monitoring and annual reporting mechanisms envisaged in the directive and where necessary, to initiate infringement proceedings or other enforcement measures to secure full compliance and to allocate dedicated funding under the next MFF, and to propose a recommendation for binding EU-level quality standards for long-term care services, including staffing, training and quality assurance; calls on the Commission to review the Work-Life Balance Directive to ensure it is fit for purpose, to strengthen it by further developing and expanding maternity, paternity and shared parental care leave, and improving incentives for the second parent to take parental leave, further protecting parents and facilitating the combination of paid employment and caregiving responsibilities; urges the Commission to extend paid maternity and paternity leave periods across Member States, promote non-transferable parental leave, and adopt measures to redistribute caregiving responsibilities within households and between the state and families;

60. Highlights that inadequate transport infrastructure, lack of public transport connectivity, and unaffordable mobility options constitute a gendered structural barrier to women’s access to employment, education, healthcare, and care services, particularly in rural, remote, and low-income areas; calls on the Commission and the Member States to prioritise investment in inclusive, safe, affordable and sustainable transport systems that take into account women’s specific mobility patterns and needs, as part of broader efforts to reduce transport poverty and promote territorial equality;

61. Stresses the need to implement an ‘equal earner – equal carer’ model in the EU with the aim of achieving a more equal gender balance concerning care responsibilities for all EU Member States, and in the EU institutions; calls for strong promotion of paternity leave, introduced by the Work-Life Balance Directive, as well as awareness raising on the close link between the measures for work-life balance and the gender care gap, which feeds into the employment, pay and pension gap; underlines that caregiving responsibilities must not be a barrier to women’s career progression;

62. Calls for the introduction of a European Day of Work-Life Balance on 20 March each year, symbolically reflecting the spring day-night equality;

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RemovedEqual representation and political participation

Removed64. Stresses that women remain significantly under-represented on all levels of political decision-making; urges the Commission to promote substantive gender equality, including by introducing permanent or temporary special measures to achieve 50:50 gender parity, such as legislative gender quotas and zipping-based lists, as well as monitoring mechanisms, for all elections including on local, regional, national and European level, in line with CEDAW general recommendation No.40 and to address all obstacles to gender equality, equal participation and representation in the political sphere;

Removed65. Stresses that the European Parliament and College of Commissioners must serve as a role model in this regard and ensure that gender parity mechanisms are in place ahead of the 2029 European elections; urges the Commission to develop guidelines for Member States, the private sector and civil society to help establish gender equality targets and strategies including equal leadership opportunities;

Climate, environment and gender equality

63. Underlines the harmful effects that environmental degradation has on the health of women and girls, especially the impact of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and urges the Commission to raise awareness of these links and to ensure a coordinated and comprehensive approach to this climate change-gender equality nexus in all its work and to enforce policies to prevent the continued destruction of the environment and the ongoing degradation of the health of women, girls and vulnerable groups;

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Removed67. Recalls that a just green transition is necessary to avoid severe future crises and increased poverty; recalls, furthermore, that the green transition will only be socially fair if it includes a gender perspective and guarantees equal opportunities for women and those experiencing intersectional discrimination as well as their meaningful inclusion in the policymaking process; calls, therefore, on the Commission to appoint an EU gender and climate coordinator with sufficient staff and funding, and to introduce gender impact assessments in all EU policies and legislation, in particular in European Green Deal initiatives;

Added64. Underlines that foreign policy, security and defence should be understood in their broadest sense, through a human-centred approach, including social, educational, environmental and cultural dimensions, social and climate justice, all of which require strong democracies and equality, including gender equality; stresses the need to implement the Women, Peace and Security agenda as a core principal of the EU’s common foreign and security policy (CFSP) and reiterates that all CFSP-related financing must take this into account while acknowledging the broader aspects of security; calls on the Commission to take stock of the progress made in implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda at EU level and present its conclusions to the Council and the European Parliament; urges the Commission to put forward, based on the stock-taking exercise, a follow-up Action Plan to the Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2019-2024, adapting and extending it to the changing nature of conflicts and new threats and presenting actions to achieve gender-balanced and gender-responsive leadership at EU decision-making levels; calls for the advancement of the implementation of UN Resolution 1325 through National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security (NAP 1325-IV) and calls on the Commission and the Member States to reinforce the recruitment, retention and advancement of women in national armed forces and civilian missions, and to integrate gender perspectives into security and defence policymaking, planning and implementation;

RemovedFeminist foreign policy

Removed68. Calls on the Commission to promote and advance a feminist foreign, security, trade and development policy that gives priority to gender equality and protects women’s rights in line with the three ‘R’s (rights, representation and resources) and entails a gender transformative vision, putting the need to address unequal structures and power relations at its centre; highlights that such a policy must advocate for systemic changes and the dismantlement of systems of oppression, including colonialism, racism and patriarchy; calls on the Commission to put forward concrete Feminist Foreign Policy actions and measures to ensure equal and meaningful participation and leadership of women in foreign policy, defence and security, and conflict prevention, management and resolution, peace negotiations, as well as peacebuilding, peacekeeping and humanitarian response; calls on the Commission to develop a common tracking methodology for collecting data on women’s participation in these sectors; as studies show the success of Feminist Foreign Policy, given that peace agreements with women signatories have higher rates of implementation and last longer102; highlights the need to ensure that the EU leads by example and ensures a balanced gender representation in its external actions;

Removed69. Underlines that foreign policy, security and defence should be understood in their broadest sense, through a human-centred approach, including social, educational, environmental and cultural dimensions, social and climate justice, all of which require strong democracies and equality, including gender equality; stresses the need to implement the Women, Peace and Security agenda as a core principal of the EU’s common foreign and security policy (CFSP) and reiterates that all CFSP-related financing must take this into account while acknowledging the broader aspects of security; calls on the Commission to take stock of the progress made in implementing the Women, Peace and Security agenda at EU level and present its conclusions to the Council and the European Parliament; urges the Commission to put forward, based on the stock-taking exercise, a follow-up Action Plan to the Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security 2019-2024, adapting and extending it to the changing nature of conflicts and new threats and presenting actions to achieve gender-balanced and gender-responsive leadership at all EU decision-making levels and sufficient in-house capacity to systemically integrate a holistic gender perspective and conduct gender analysis; calls for the advancement of the implementation of UN Resolution 1325 through National Action Plans on Women, Peace and Security (NAP 1325-IV) and calls on the Commission and the Member States to reinforce the recruitment, retention and advancement of women in national armed forces and civilian missions, and to integrate gender perspectives into all phases of security and defence policymaking, planning and implementation;

65. Calls on the Commission to ensure consistent and sustainable budgeting for all gender-related activities in the EU defence and security sector, in line with the EU Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security; emphasises the need for dedicated funding for gender-related actions within common security and defence policy (CSDP) missions, including a specific budget line for gender advisors on civilian CSDP missions;

66. Emphasises that crises, such as armed conflicts, occupation of territory, natural disasters and humanitarian crises, energy poverty, climate change and the cost-of-living crisis exacerbate existing inequalities; feminist, LGBTIQ+ and SRHR human rights defenders working on these issues must be protected through dedicated mechanisms, especially in countries experiencing democratic backsliding; calls on the Commission to add crisis management, preparedness and security to the future post-2025 Gender Equality Strategy;

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Changed72.67. Calls on the Commission to undertake another revision of the progress achieved in implementing the current Gender Action Plan (GAP III) and to continue to implement the mechanism to track the amount of EU funding for gender equality allocated and disbursed in partner countries and report on it through GAP III; urges the Commission to keep the pace and the level of ambition for the implementation of the plan high and calls on the Commission to start preparations for an ambitious Gender Action Plan post-2027 (GAP IV) to ensure its timely adoption, including by setting aside adequate funding for the implementation of the plan in the upcoming proposal for the 2028-2034 MFF; highlights that the key principles of GAP III – a human-rights based approach, including SRHR, intersectionality and a gender-transformative approach – should be an integral part of GAP IV and their concrete implementation should be strengthened; calls on the Commission to increase political and financial support for gender-equality initiatives and UN agencies such as UN Women and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), with a specific focus on the UNFPA Supply Partnership and to ensure that the next MFF contains strengthened gender equality targets in external actions with 85 % of all EU official development assistance (ODA) mainstreaming gender (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) marker G1) and 20 % of ODA dedicated to gender-targeted projects (OECD marker 2);Partnership;

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Removed73. Stresses that gender equality and SRHR must be an indivisible and non-negotiable pillar of the EU’s feminist foreign, development and external policy, including GAP IV, and calls on the Commission to ensure adequate, predictable and long-term funding for gender equality and SRHR initiatives, particularly in low-and-middle-income countries, including by ensuring access to SRHR for survivors of GBV, to emergency contraception, safe and legal abortion, post-abortion care and comprehensive high-quality obstetric, gynaecological, antenatal, childbirth and postnatal midwifery and newborn healthcare as well as post-exposure prophylaxis in all EU-funded humanitarian responses; by supporting feminist and grassroots movements, strengthening and partnering with women’s rights organisations and civil society organisations working on SRHR in all, but especially restrictive contexts, by advocating for the removal of legal and policy barriers that criminalise abortion, same-sex relations and gender-affirming healthcare and to ensure access to education, healthcare and economic opportunities; calls on the Commission to systematically integrate a feminist dimension into its response to international crisis and conflicts, including through the strict condemnation of the use of sexual and other GBV as a weapon of war and the mobilisation of dedicated funding to eradicate this crime;

Added68. Calls on the Commission to establish a dedicated support service operating through EU Diplomatic Representations in third countries, with a specific mandate to provide support for women’s rights defenders and organisations globally in order to counter anti-gender movements; urges the Commission and the Member States to reaffirm their commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment globally and to increase funding for women’s organisations, especially in the Global South and in regions where gender equality is under attack so as to step into the gaps in development aid for women’s rights organisations that were caused by the cuts in aid from the US Agency for International Development (USAID);

Removed74. Calls on the Commission to establish a dedicated support service operating through EU Diplomatic Representations in third countries, with a specific mandate to provide support for women’s rights defenders and organisations globally in order to counter anti-gender movements and to allocate targeted funding to Permanent Representations to enable them to effectively carry out this task; urges the Commission and the Member States to reaffirm their commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment globally and to increase funding for women’s organisations, especially in the Global South and in regions where gender equality is under attack so as to step into the gaps in development aid for women’s rights organisations that were caused by the cuts in aid from the US Agency for International Development (USAID);

▸4 unchanged paragraphs

69. Urges the Commission to guarantee coherence across the internal and external policies on gender equality, namely in the upcoming post 2025 Gender Equality Strategy (GAP III and GAP IV) and to ensure that they are coordinated with all other relevant existing and forthcoming strategies, frameworks and action plans, such as the EU Disability Strategy 2021-2030, EU Roma Strategic Framework on equality, inclusion and participation, EU Strategy on Victims’ Rights, LGBTIQ Strategy and the EU Action Plan against Racism; calls on the Commission to ensure greater transparency and stakeholder involvement in the implementation of all gender-related initiatives, and to involve Parliament more systematically in the scrutiny and evaluation of these actions;

Protecting civil society and women’s rights organisations and countering anti-gender movements

70. Notes with concern the alarming rise in hate crimes and hate speech targeting women, LGBTIQ+ individuals, racial or ethnic minorities and other marginalised groups, and emphasises the link between deteriorating rule of law and democratic standards and the violation of fundamental rights, particularly women’s and minorities’ rights; highlights that the inconsistent implementation of safeguards across Member States leads to inadequate protection and exposes certain groups to higher risks of discrimination and violence; expresses concern over the lack of progress on the implementation of equality and anti-discrimination laws in some Member States and urges the Commission to address this in the post 2025 Gender Equality Strategy; welcomes the reversal of the decision to withdraw the horizontal anti-discrimination directive and urges the Member States to adopt the legislation without delay;

71. Urges the Commission to ensure a comprehensive monitoring and accountability mechanism to swiftly address the continuing erosion of democracy, women’s rights and gender equality, including SRHR and the rights of LGBTIQ+ persons, which are intrinsically linked; calls on the Commission to build on the existing mechanisms to assess compliance with the rule of law or fundamental rights and to progressively develop a dedicated mechanism encompassing all Union values under Article 2 TEU, including democracy, the rule of law and fundamental and human rights, including women’s rights, operating under an interinstitutional agreement between the Commission, Parliament, and the Council, ensuring a unified approach to annual monitoring across all Member States and a clear link to concrete Union measures for cases in which deficiencies remain unaddressed; notes all measures to counter backsliding should reflect an intersectional perspective; urges the Commission to conduct in-depth research on anti-gender movements to gain deeper insights into their current operations and financing strategies; stresses that understanding these dynamics is crucial for safeguarding a modern, inclusive and tolerant Europe;

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Changed78.72. Highlights with great concern the growth of the ‘manosphere’; underlines that algorithms used by social media platforms amplify extreme misogynistic content; urges the Commission to investigate and sanction VPLOs that do not fulfil their obligations to remove harmful content; urges the Commission to explore the growing divergence in attitudes between young men and women towards feminism and gender equality, to assess its societal consequences, particularly in online spaces, and to develop measures to address and counter the rise of misogynistic, far-right values among boys and young men concerning gender equality and women’s rights; calls therefore on the Commission to promote comprehensive, age appropriate sexuality and relationship education in schools, strengthen critical media literacy, counter gender misinformation and disinformation and address gender stereotypes; stresses the need for a deeper understanding of the incel phenomenon and ideology and emphasises the importance of prevention by more active policies to counter them and their narratives together with potential underlying mental health issues and security issues;

▸5 unchanged paragraphs

73. Recalls the crucial and indispensable role that civil society organisations (CSOs) play , in a system of checks and balances in a healthy democracy, especially women’s rights organisations and women human rights defenders including those working in the humanitarian sector, in defending and advancing gender equality, human rights, and fundamental freedoms, especially during times of political, social, and institutional backlash; calls on the Commission to recognise, protect, ensure the safety of, and support civil society organisations, women’s human rights organisations and defenders, feminist, LGBTIQ+ and sexual and reproductive rights movements which are essential in advocating for inclusive policy reforms, challenging discriminatory practices, and mobilising communities in the defence of fundamental rights in the EU and globally; notes that they are increasingly being targeted by far right and anti-right actors; calls on the Commission to include as a horizontal pillar in EU policies and in the post 2025 Gender Equality Strategy actions and recommendations on the safeguarding and support of civil society organisations working on women’s rights, gender equality and anti-discrimination;

74. Urges the Commission to ensure sustainable and accessible funding for women’s rights organisations, including through the new MFF and to maintain and strengthen its commitment to supporting civil society, including financially through the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme (CERV), ensuring that it remains a robust tool for addressing emerging threats to rights and freedoms; calls in particular on the Commission to maintain CERV as a stand-alone programme under direct management and substantially increase its funding in order to respond to the needs of underfunded CSOs and to the increasing threats and challenges to civic space and EU values; urges the Commission to maintain the programmes dedicated strand to gender equality and women’s rights, including SRHR, as well as dedicated strands such as Daphne, which should remain an autonomous programme with a separate budget line in the new MFF to combat GBV and discrimination including against LGBTIQ people;

75. Warns that a significant portion of the funding driving the growth of anti-gender movements across the EU comes from foreign actors; reiterates that all funding must align with the common values of the Union as enshrined in Article 2 TEU and the Charter of Fundamental Rights, ensuring that financial support reinforces the democratic values of the EU; calls on the Commission to revise and audit all current funding, in a gender-responsive manner on a ‘do no harm’ principle in order to ensure that no EU funds go towards anti-democratic and anti-gender objectives and projects; urges the Commission to closely monitor the implementation in Member States of funds under shared management aimed at promoting gender equality and supporting civil society, including women non-governmental organisations, in order to ensure that calls for proposals to obtain such funds are not being deliberately paused or withheld;

76. Calls on the Commission to closely monitor the implementation by the Member States of judgments from both the European Court of Human Rights and the CJEU, with particular attention to those related to gender equality, non-discrimination and minority rights, ensuring full adherence to international obligations;

Cross-cutting means of achieving gender equality

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Removed83. Reiterates that all efforts to achieve progress in gender equality must follow the principles of gender mainstreaming, ensuring that gender perspectives are integrated into all policies, actions and processes across all levels of governance, within the EU; calls on the Commission to recommit, to gender mainstreaming in all sectors, including in non-social sectors such as trade, energy, agriculture; calls on the Commission to mainstream gender equality in all EU migration and asylum policies with special focus on women, girls and LGBTIQ+ people, and to mitigate protection risks; calls on the Commission to continue to undertake a formal evaluation of the gender impact of EU financed programmes, including modalities such as budget support, and to report back to the European Parliament; stresses that this evaluation should be based on gender-disaggregated data and that its result should be integrated in future programming; reiterates the importance of financial resources for gender mainstreaming;

Removed84. Calls on the Commission to ensure and strengthen the application of gender mainstreaming in its structures, methods and tools, and to ensure that the gender perspective is integrated into all of the Commission’s proposals, including all budgetary procedures;

Removed85. Calls on the Commission to support the setting up of a gender-equality policy expert group to support the existing Commission task force on addressing the specific challenges that impact women’s quality of life and participation in society, foster collaboration and exchange of best practices, drive the women’s health, social, research and education agenda across the EU and meet the EU Treaty’s goal to eliminate inequalities and promote equality;

Removed86. Calls on the Commission to ensure, in the framework of the next MFF, a gender-budgeting approach across all pillars, funding instruments and budget lines and to ensure that they all actively contribute to gender equality goals at all stages; urges the Commission to further develop the current ‘tracking-only’ stage into fully fledged gender budgeting, embedding the gender equality perspective across the entire budget cycle, from planning and allocation to monitoring of financial resources, especially to address gaps in terms of collecting gender-disaggregated data and to clarify scoring criteria, including implementing a score category to capture budgetary interventions with a negative impact on gender equality, as this is currently lacking, and to ensure that it is done in time for the upcoming MFF 2028-2034; stresses that this requires setting clear priorities, commitments and indicators on gender equality via a targeted approach, as well as setting concrete criteria to measure progress;

77. Calls for adequate funding for EU research on gender equality, including for the EIGE and the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, and through tools such as projects of the gender equality plans funded by Horizon Europe; calls for an improved methodology that should identify not only the beneficiaries of EU funds, but also the transformative potential of the programmes; urges the Commission to ensure that EU funds are only granted to projects that comply with the fundamental rights and principles of the EU, including gender equality, access to SRHR and the elimination of GBV; urges the Commission to ensure a just and socially fair transition that works for all by developing a gender-transformative intersectional strategy to address key issues and stresses the need to boost investment in essential social services significantly with a view to contributing to the independence, equality and emancipation of women;

78. Acknowledges that many women face intersecting inequalities and discrimination in the EU and urges the Commission to further develop the application of intersectionality as a cross-cutting principle in the new post-2025 Gender Equality Strategy and within all legislative and non-legislative measures;

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Changed89.79. Urges the Commission and the Member States to address intersectionality in all policies related to gender equality, acknowledging that GBV and discrimination are also compounded by factors such as age, race, ethnicity, minority or migration status,minority, disability, gender identity and sexual orientation, and that the intersection of these factors creates multiple and unique forms of discrimination that require targeted, context-specific measures;

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Removed90. Calls on the Commission to explicitly include trans people, especially trans women and girls, in all gender equality measures, to standardise access to legal gender recognition, and to develop specific actions against transphobia, especially in healthcare, employment and education;

80. Calls on the Commission to ensure that measures cover all EU territory and that they provide effective instruments to address regional disparities in gender equality both between and within EU Member States and their regions; stresses that these measures should be adaptable and adequately resourced to tackle gender disparities, taking into account the available resources, accessibility and level of progress of each region;

81. Regrets that despite the vital role women in rural areas play in maintaining their communities and keeping agriculture viable, their contribution is often unacknowledged and they continue to face numerous challenges, including limited employment opportunities, poorer access to services, less developed infrastructure and under-representation in decision-making; calls on the Commission to create and implement sub-programmes and activities dedicated to women in rural areas;

Institutional environment for achieving gender equality

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Removed93. Calls on the Commission to continue to ensure annual publication of reports on the implementation of the post-2025 Gender Equality Strategy and to present them to the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality (FEMM) in order to enable Parliament to contribute to the strategy’s scrutiny and oversight;

82. Calls on the Commission to enhance and support the Council configuration on gender equality gathering ministers and secretaries of state in charge of gender equality, dedicated to the questions of women’s rights and gender equality to deliver common and concrete measures including through the Council presidencies, and to ensure that gender-equality issues are discussed at the highest political level;

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Changed95.83. Urges the Commission to monitor and encourage swift implementation of the Directive on standards for equality bodies (Directive (EU) 2024/1499) and to put forward a recommendation to Member States regarding standards for their functioning and tasks in order to facilitate the correct transposition of the directive and ensure harmonisation of the set-up of equality bodies across the Union; stresses the importance of the EU’s accession to the European Convention on Human Rights and calls on the Commission to take action towards achieving this goal by requesting the CJEU’s legal opinion;

84. Praises the EIGE’s constructive cooperation and its dedicated work, which plays a crucial role in adequate data collection, analysis of comparable disaggregated data, providing research and guidance to EU institutions and Member States, as well as monitoring the implementation of gender-relevant EU legislation across all the EU Member States; calls on the Commission to ensure that the EIGE has sufficient financial and human resources and capacity to be able to effectively perform its tasks; recalls that the EIGE has experienced persistent issues with understaffing, which were further aggravated by the sharp increase in requests for technical assistance; calls therefore for the EIGE to be allocated new temporary agents;

85. Calls on the Commission to actively consult and involve women and girls in all their diversity, including through representative organisations, in the preparation and implementation of the post 2025 Gender Equality Strategy;

86. Calls on the Commission to recognise the important role that CSOs and actors on different levels, such as rural communities, local action groups, local and regional municipalities, as well as academia and institutions such as the Committee of the Regions, play in realising gender equality; calls, therefore, on the Commission to follow an inclusive approach and closely involve all these stakeholders in helping achieve the goals of the post-2025 Gender Equality Strategy;