The Commission 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 European Union of equality. It sets out policy objectives and initiatives to achieve significant progress towards a gender-equal Europe by 2025.
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 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.
Achievements
InvestEU backed total investments of EUR 2.4 billion supporting gender equality in 2023. The programme aims to provide tailored advisory support and capacity building to improve access to finance for female-founded and female-led companies.
Horizon Europe requires for applying entities to have a Gender Equality Plan in place to be eligible for funding. The EU Award for Gender Equality champions, awarded for the first time in March 2023, seeks to foster a community of champions who can inspire and encourage other academic and research organisations towards becoming gender equality champions.
The ’100 Percent’ project, backed by the European Social Fund, offers free consultancy to Austrian companies to help them close the salary gap. The project supports companies to design transparent remuneration systems and to recognise and improve opportunities for women at work.
Recovery and resilience investments are complemented by structural reforms that can be supported by the Technical Support Instrument, and which have a considerable impact on gender equality. These include the reforms to close the gender pay gap in Estonia, to combat gender inequalities in Portugal, to better regulate the profession of nursing assistants in Sweden, to improve the prenatal and neonatal health screening in Bulgaria, and the Spanish Public Health Strategy, which incorporates a gender and equity perspective in all public health actions.
In Yemen, the Commission mobilised over EUR 5 million in partnership with Save the Children to monitor and report grave violations and other serious child rights violations and to deliver life-saving child protection. This action was implemented with a specific focus on gender: following specific consultations with girls; targeting specific problems for girls (child marriage, early pregnancies, school dropout and lack of safety); and with the aim of ensuring women’s and girl’s empowerment, equal access services and community participation.
Under the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument programme, in the Eastern Partnership, the EUR 9.7 million EU4Gender equality programme 2020-2023 continues to aim to strengthen equal rights and opportunities for women and men in the Eastern Neighbourhood by challenging gender stereotypes, work on violence prevention and championing men’s participation in care work. The programme also includes a reform helpdesk that supports governments’ reform work towards equal opportunities for women and men.
How much do we spend?
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, investing in care facilities, supporting female entrepreneurship, combating gender segregation in certain professions and addressing 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.
The Commission developed its methodology to measure expenditure relating to gender equality at the programme level in the 2021-2027 multiannual financial framework. 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 was used for the first time across all spending programmes for the financial year 2021, in the context of the 2023 draft budget. This was ahead of the commitments under the interinstitutional agreement accompanying the 2021-2027 multiannual financial framework, in terms of both timeline and scope. For the financial years 2022 and 2023, the methodology was used without modifications. This year, the monitoring of gender expenditure has been enhanced with the inclusion in the ‘programme performance statements’ (Annex 4 of the present report) of the gender disaggregated data available per programme.
The results of the methodology to measure expenditure relating to gender equality reflect 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 gender scores based on the objectives pursued by its respective interventions. The total of the EU budget, based on the aggregation of the 2023 interventions qualifying for each score, has been allocated as shown below.
- Score 2: interventions the principal objective of which is to improve gender equality corresponded to 2% of the EU budget implemented in 2023 and were included in 13 programmes.
- Score 1: interventions having gender equality as an important and deliberate objective (but not as the main reason for the intervention) corresponded to 9% of the EU budget implemented in 2023 and were included in 16 programmes.
- Score 0*: interventions having the potential to contribute to gender equality corresponded to 20% of the EU budget implemented in 2023 and were included in 30 programmes.
- Score 0: interventions not having a significant bearing on gender equality corresponded to 69% of the EU budget implemented in 2023 and were included in 29 programmes.
In 2023, 11% of the EU budget contributed concretely to the promotion of gender equality (scores 2 and 1), while 20% has the potential to contribute (score 0*) to this objective. On the other hand, 69% of the EU budget can be considered not to have a (significant) bearing on the promotion of gender equality on the basis of the information currently available.
The 2023 results reflect the progress achieved by various programmes in terms of both implementation and reporting capacity, allowing to capture the contribution of the EU budget to gender equality at a more granular level. A key example is the Recovery and Resilience Facility. Following a Commission exercise to flag the Recovery and Resilience Facility measures that include a focus on gender equality, this year the EU budget commitments for this facility from 2021 to 2023 have been assigned scores of 2, 1 and 0, from the previous 0* score.
In 2023, the total EU budget expenditure on projects receiving gender scores 2 and 1 has increased significantly, compared to the amounts reported for 2021 and 2022 in previous years.
Contribution to gender scores 1 and 2 for 2021, 2022 and 2023 (million EUR) (*)
(*) Based on the amounts reported in the Annual Management Performance Report for the financial years 2021, 2002 and 2023.
Source: European Commission.
When looking at the share of the expenditure in each gender score, it is important to underline the impact in 2023 of the revision of the Recovery and Resilience Facility plans for the RepowerEU chapter. Excluding the measures implemented to tackle the energy crisis with the RepowerEU chapters in the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the share of implemented budget commitments would show an increase of score 2 from 2.1% to 2.5%, and score 1 from 9.1% to 11.9%. 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.
Number of programmes with gender equality intervention (classified by their highest score)
Recovery and Resilience Facility
Under the Recovery and Resilience Facility (1), the 27 plans adopted contain 136 measures with a focus on gender equality. The investments fully devoted to gender equality include, for instance, the national roll-out of ‘early aid’ for socially disadvantaged pregnant women in Austria; incentives to foster female entrepreneurship in Italy; the creation of a support line for women in rural and urban areas; and the set-up of a national plan to tackle gender-based violence in Spain. Investments contributing directly or indirectly to gender equality include the improvement of working conditions for professions traditionally performed by women (e.g. the operationalisation of work cards for domestic workers in Romania); investments to boost up/re-skilling of disadvantaged groups, including girls and women (e.g. the ‘Solas recovery skills response’ programme in Ireland and the funding activities to increase the engagement of women and improving their awareness of information and communication technology career opportunities in Latvia); and investments to improve delivery of care to older people and people with disabilities, a task often taken up by women in the household (e.g. the improvement of home health care in Greece).
These crucial investments are complemented by structural reforms, supported by the Technical Support Instrument, which will have a considerable impact on gender equality. These include the reforms to close the gender pay gap in Estonia, to combat gender inequalities in Portugal, to better regulate the profession of nursing assistants in Sweden and to improve the prenatal and neonatal health screening in Bulgaria. The combination of investments and reforms is one of the main novelties of the Recovery and Resilience Facility. The interplay between gender-related investments and reforms will ensure a higher impact of the Recovery and Resilience Facility spending.
(1) European Commission (February 2024), ‘Mid-term evaluation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF)’, https://commission.europa.eu/about-european-commission/departments-and-executive-agencies/economic-and-financial-affairs/evaluation-reports-economic-and-financial-affairs-policies-and-spending-activities/mid-term-evaluation-recovery-and-resilience-facility-rrf_en.
Gender-disaggregated data
This year the ‘programme performance statements’ (Annex 4 of this report), which provide detailed performance information at the programme level, have been enhanced to include the relevant gender-disaggregated information available for each programme. This includes a wide array of gender-disaggregated data aimed at improving the monitoring of the performance of the programme in relation to gender equality. For some programmes, particularly those under shared and indirect management, the availability of gender-disaggregated data is constrained by the programme regulations and the implementation agreements.
Looking ahead to the post-2027 multiannual financial framework, the co-legislators have agreed to include in the financial regulation a requirement to ensure that all data collected in relation to performance indicators of the financial programmes will be gender-disaggregated where appropriate. This is a significant step towards improving gender equality monitoring in our programmes and complements the updated ‘better regulation guidelines’, which will ensure that future ex ante impact assessments of all relevant spending programmes duly consider the effects on gender equality from the start.
Examples of gender-disaggregated data reported in the programme performance statements
Under the Recovery and Resilience Facility, out of the 1.7 million participants receiving education and training support by the facility in 2023, 1.1 million were female participants, 0.6 million were male participants and 416 were non-binary participants. In addition, the total number of 623 840 people in employment or job searching activities supported by the facility in 2023 is subdivided into 390 479 female, 233 349 male and 12 non-binary participants across all age groups.
Under Horizon Europe, in 2023, out of 54 411 researchers(2) involved in upskilling activities (training, mentoring/coaching, mobility and access to research and innovation infrastructures) in projects funded by the programme(3), 44.5% were female researchers, 55.4% were male researchers and 0.1% were non-binary researchers.
Under Erasmus+, in 2022 60% of the provided mobility opportunities were taken up by women. The gender distribution varies depending on the field of education: school education has the highest percentage of women (70%), followed by adult education (69%), higher education (61%), youth (57%) and vocational education (52%)(4).
Under the Citizens, Equality, Right and Values programme, the data collected shows that projects selected for funding in the 2023 plan involve and target more women than men (52% v 45%, while around 3% are non-binary.
Under the Humanitarian Aid programme, the percentage of beneficiaries disaggregated by gender is as follows: 52% female, 45% male, 3% unknown(5).
(2)It covers only category C and category D researchers.
(3)Excluding the European Institute of Innovation and Technology cascading grants and Joint Research Centre direct activities.
(4)European Commission (2023), Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, Erasmus+ annual report 2022, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2766/211791.
(5)Data extracted from EVA Actions operational data. The data compiled in this internal database have been directly encoded by partners and officers. However, dates have not been double checked to avoid double counting, and thus do not reflect on the final number of beneficiaries from humanitarian actions financed by the Commission in 2023.