April 2026

The European Commission published its Gender Equality Strategy (GES) 2026–2030 on 5 March 2026, defining its framework for advancing gender equality over the next five years. WAVE’s review of the Strategy is grounded in our members’ frontline experience and supporting survivors every day in shelters, helplines, and women’s centres.

The Strategy arrives at a moment when gender equality is under increasing pressure. Eighteen women are killed every week across the EU. Funding for women’s rights organisations is shrinking, with cuts from both European and international sources deepening an already precarious operational environment. The globally organised backlash against gender equality is well resourced and gaining ground across Europe, also on national level. At the same time, technology-facilitated violence against women is rising sharply, with online platforms increasingly used to spread misogynistic narratives that target women and girls in their private and public lives – a trend that demands a determined response. This is the context in which WAVE has reviewed the GES 2026–2030, and it is the benchmark against which we assess its ambitions.

The GES 2026–2030 contains genuine progress, and WAVE acknowledges that. The Strategy commits to supporting Member States in transposing the 2024 EU  Directive on VAW/DV and ties EU action to the 2026 GREVIO baseline evaluation – an accountability mechanism that WAVE and our member organisations will actively use. The EU’s accession to the Istanbul Convention in 2023 was the most consequential gender equality achievement of the previous strategy cycle. Building on this  the new Strategy rightly anchors its implementation in the Convention’s monitoring process.

We welcome the Strategy’s commitment to dedicated funding for feminist and women’s rights organisations through AgoraEU and Global Europe, subject to adoption of the next EU Budget. We also welcome its engagement with technology-facilitated violence against women and its formal recognition of the organised backlash against gender equality as a threat to democratic values. Women’s CSOs have been raising this alarm for years – making the Commission’s acknowledgement a meaningful step forward.

On external action, we welcome the renewal of GAP IV and the new Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Action Plan. These commitments matter directly to WAVE as our network includes member organisations in countries beyond EU borders, in the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood and across the Western Balkans, whose work to support women survivors and advance Istanbul Convention implementation depends on sustained EU external funding and political commitment to gender equality in those regions.

Beyond the violence against women pillar, we welcome the Strategy’s recognition of barriers women face in accessing healthcare, including its commitment to a framework for collecting sexual and reproductive health and rights data. We also welcome the Strategy’s attention to sexual harassment in the workplace, its commitments to implementing the Pay Transparency Directive, and its integration of a gender perspective into anti-poverty and housing frameworks. These are substantive commitments. Whether they translate into durable change for women across Europe will depend on the implementation framework, and that is where the new Strategy falls somewhat short.

The new Gender Equality Strategy’s most significant structural gap is its near-exclusive reliance on non-binding instruments: guidance, monitoring, best practice exchanges, and regulatory dialogue. This makes implementation dependent on Member States’ political will – yet it is precisely at national level that gender equality obligations have been most unevenly applied. WAVE calls on the Commission to identify, where legally enforceable measures could translate the Strategy’s ambitions into durable change during the implementation period.

On violence against women, the implementation framework has the potential to extend well beyond VAW Directive transposition and the addressing of technology-facilitated violence. Femicide requires a coherent EU-wide approach to prevention, data collection, and documentation. Comprehensive prevention, as required by the Istanbul Convention, calls for more than best practice networks alone. Addressing structural gaps also requires political will on two fronts that remain absent from the Strategy: a proposal to extend the Eurocrimes list under Article 83(1) TFEU to include violence against women, establishing an explicit EU-level criminal law basis; and a dedicated Gender Equality Council formation, giving EU ministers a formal forum to coordinate responses to growing threats. These are concrete steps that would have considerably strengthened the new GES’s impact;  their absence points to a broader gap between the Strategy’s ambitions and the tools available to achieve them.

That pattern extends to the Strategy’s intersectional commitments, which need to be translated into concrete actions. Migrant and refugee women face compounded barriers at the intersection of violence against women and precarious legal status. This needs to be actively addressed in the context of the EU’s implementation of the Pact on Migration and its new Return Regulation. The rights of racialised, migrant, and undocumented women must be protected. They face forms of discrimination that require targeted action, not only disaggregated data. Similarly, women with disabilities experience disproportionate rates of VAW and face specific barriers to services rarely designed with their needs in mind. They are not actively included in the new GES.

WAVE calls on the Commission to ensure that women and girls are consistently named as the primary subjects of gender-based violence, economic disadvantage, and structural inequality throughout all implementation tools and communications. Engaging men and boys as actors in prevention is both necessary and fully consistent with Istanbul Convention requirements. However, this engagement must complement –  not displace – a clear, evidence-based focus on women and girls as the primary targets of gender-based harm. Mainstreaming gender equality through gender-neutral language or approaches risks obscuring the structural nature of that harm and weakening the political commitment needed to address it. Visibility in policy language is not a symbolic concern; it shapes resource allocation, service design, and accountability frameworks.

The Strategy’s credibility will ultimately depend on how its commitments are monitored and enforced, yet this is currently underdeveloped – at a time when it is most needed. WAVE will measure this Strategy by the concrete improvements in the safety, rights, and opportunities of women and girls across Europe that it delivers over the next five years. We look forward to engaging the Commission, Member States, and civil society partners in holding that ambition to account.

Read WAVE’s full analysis of the GES 2026–2030 here.