The Council of Europe has defined gender mainstreaming as ‘the (re)organisation, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes, so that a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and at all stages, by the actors normally involved in policymaking’. According to the European Institute for Gender Equality, gender mainstreaming ‘involves the integration of a gender perspective into the preparation, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies, regulatory measures and spending programmes, with a view to promoting equality between women and men, and combating discrimination’.
The Commission has established gender equality as a cross-cutting objective for all policy areas.
The Commission’s long-standing commitment to gender equality gained new momentum with the adoption of the 2020-2025 gender equality strategy, which delivers on the Commission’s commitment to achieving a Union of equality. It sets out policy objectives and initiatives to achieve significant progress towards a gender-equal Europe by 2025. The goal is a EU where everybody, in all their diversity, is free to pursue their chosen path in life, has equal opportunities to thrive and can equally participate in and lead our European society. The key objectives of the strategy are ending gender-based violence, challenging gender stereotypes, closing gender gaps in the labour market, achieving equal participation across different sectors of the economy, addressing the gender pay and pension gaps, closing the gender care gap and achieving gender balance in decision-making and in politics. It pursues a dual approach of gender mainstreaming combined with targeted initiatives, and intersectionality is a horizontal principle for its implementation. While the strategy focuses on initiatives within the EU, it is consistent with the EU’s external policy on gender equality and women’s empowerment.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic the Commission has moved decisively to develop a comprehensive set of initiatives, comprising both first-response measures and more structural measures, in the context of NextGenerationEU and the reinforced multiannual financial framework. The resulting policy response focuses on fair and inclusive recovery. It ensures that equality is at the heart of recovery, and it is designed to mitigate the disproportionate impact that the crisis has had on many vulnerable groups in society, irrespective of sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation.
As concerns funding in particular, in line with the 2020-2025 gender equality strategy, NextGenerationEU and the 2021-2027 multiannual financial framework provide a wide range of EU funding and budgetary guarantee instruments to support initiatives promoting women’s labour market participation and work–life balance, invest in care facilities, support female entrepreneurship, combat gender segregation in certain professions and address the imbalanced representation of girls and boys in some sectors of education and training. Furthermore, dedicated funding is provided for projects benefiting civil-society organisations and public institutions that implement specific initiatives, including preventing and combating gender-based violence. For instance, through the citizens, rights, equality and values programme, the Commission continues to support civil-society organisations and other stakeholders active at the local, regional, national and transnational levels across Europe in tackling gender-based violence and promoting gender equality. Violence, and in particular gender-based violence, is covered by a dedicated strand and a specific objective (Daphne). Furthermore, the Commission has acted to directly support the healthcare systems of EU Member States, where the vast majority of health workers are women (78%), in their fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, in 2020 the Commission mobilised EUR 3 billion from the EU budget through the rescEU medical equipment capacity and the Emergency Support Instrument for the healthcare sector.
In line with its commitment to constantly strengthen its reporting framework, the Commission applies dedicated systems under the 2021-2027 multiannual financial framework to track gender-relevant expenditure in EU funding programmes. In particular, under the current multiannual financial framework – as in the previous programming period – external action programmes (Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument – Global Europe, Common Foreign and Security Policy, Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance, overseas countries and territories (including Greenland) programme) apply the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee markers(1) to record ex ante aid activities targeting gender equality. This allows the identification of gaps between policy and financial commitments and the incentivisation of efforts to close them. According to the gender action plan III (2021-2025), at least 85% of new external initiatives implemented under the abovementioned instruments should have gender equality as a principal or a significant objective, as defined by the Development Assistance Committee’s gender equality policy markers. Furthermore, at least one initiative per country and per region should specifically target gender equality. The regulation on the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument – Global Europe further specifies that at least 5% of gender responsive initiatives should have gender equality and women’s and girls’ rights and empowerment as a principal objective.
Under Annex 1 to the common provisions regulation, a tracking system was introduced to promote the ‘gender-relevant’ focus of EU cohesion policy funds (the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund Plus, the Just Transition Fund and the Cohesion Fund). Specifically, under the dedicated systems for 2021-2027, these funds will track the investments as categorised per gender equality dimension (gender targeting / gender mainstreaming / gender neutral). This implies that each operation implemented under cohesion policy programmes will have to contain information about its contribution to gender targeting/mainstreaming. The common provisions regulation codes and the OECD Development Assistance Committee markers are aligned. Managing authorities are required to indicate the gender equality dimension of their programme in advance. This ex ante assessment is the basis for estimating the potential contribution. The methodology provides for the systematic reporting of planned and achieved levels of expenditure for gender-relevant interventions within cohesion policy programmes.
The Commission has developed a methodology to measure expenditure relating to gender equality at programme level in the 2021-2027 multiannual financial framework, with a view to further reinforcing gender mainstreaming in the post-2020 programming period, and in line with the commitment undertaken in its gender equality strategy. In this endeavour, the Commission has benefited from fruitful exchanges with the European Institute for Gender Equality, and from constructive engagement with the European Court of Auditors in the context of their special report on Gender Mainstreaming in the EU Budget, published in May 2021.
The methodology, which remains under development, was used for the first time across all spending programmes in the context of the 2023 draft budget. This is ahead of the commitments under the interinstitutional agreement accompanying the 2021-2027 multiannual financial framework, in terms of both timeline and scope (as the methodology was applied to all EU spending programmes and not simply to selected direct-management programmes). On a pilot basis, in the context of the 2024 draft budget, the methodology is used without modifications compared to last year. The methodology aims at improving gender mainstreaming in the Commission’s budgetary process by tracking the contribution made by policy design and resource allocation to gender equality objectives. It expands on the general criteria proposed by the OECD for the Rio markers and uses a similar, albeit somewhat adjusted, approach to the one used in climate tracking. In addition, the methodology is aligned with the aforementioned tracking systems for the external action programmes and the common provisions regulation.
The overview of the information reported in the programme performance statements on the basis of the methodology reflects the continuous efforts to reinforce the integration of gender mainstreaming into the EU budget. In line with the methodology a programme may qualify for one or more scores based on the objectives pursued by its respective interventions. The total of the EU budget, based on the aggregation of the 2022 interventions qualifying for each score, has been allocated as follows:
- Score 2: interventions whose principal objective is to improve gender equality are included in 12 programmes and correspond to 2% of the total Commission’s budget,
- Score 1: Interventions having gender equality as an important and deliberate objective (but not as the main reason for the intervention) follow with 9% of the total budget and are included in 15 programmes.
- Score 0* (having the potential to contribute to gender equality) correspond to 73% of the total budget and are included in 31 programmes.
- Score 0 (not having a significant bearing on gender equality) correspond to 16% of 2022’s budget, and are included in 26 programmes.
As a conclusion, on the basis of the information currently available, 84% of the EU budget either contributes (scores 2 and 1) or has the potential to contribute (score 0*) to the promotion of gender equality, while the remaining 16% of the EU budget does not have a (significant) bearing on the promotion of gender equality.
The 2022 available data reflect the progress achieved by the programmes both in terms of implementation and reporting capacity. Overall, as spending programmes have now entered the stages of programming and implementation, the budget allocated has increased compared to draft budget 2023. Furthermore, the data from programming and, where applicable, implementation have fed into the reporting, allowing to capture at a more granular level the contribution of the EU budget to gender equality. This trend has been further strengthened in programmes where dedicated tracking systems are in place, as is the case for the common provision regulation programmes or the external action programmes. This influx of relevant data, has allowed programmes to re-evaluate part of or their entire budget from score 0* to other scores. In the same vein, it has enabled programmes to discern in greater detail interventions that do not have a significant bearing on the promotion of gender equality (score 0) and the ones that are directly targeting gender equality (score 2) or have the promotion of gender equality as a significant objective (score 1). As a result, the share of implemented budget commitments targeting scores 0,1 and 2 increased due to more granular reporting from about a quarter of all programmes, while the share for score 0* decreased. It is noteworthy, that two programmes (European Defence Fund and European Space programme) have re-assessed their relevance on the promotion of gender equality and, on the basis of a dedicated study, have been re-assessed from mainly score 0 for the latter and only score 0 for the former under draft budget 2023 to score 0* for their entire budget under draft budget 2024. In the graph below, programmes are classified on the basis of the highest score they receive, even if only a part of the programme envelope contributes.
(1) The Development Assistance Committee’s methodology consists in the following scoring system:
Score 2- Gender equality is the principal objective of the intervention and is fundamental in its design and expected results;
Score 1- Gender equality is a significant objective, but not the main reason for undertaking the intervention;
Score 0- The intervention has been screened against the marker but has not been found to target gender equality.