What changed

10. Calls on the Member States to build on EIGE’s analyses and findings on women’s entrepreneurship and self-employment across all Member States, ensuring good quality, comparable data collection and coherent metrics for access to finance, business survival rates, growth, sectoral representation and innovation, to publish comparative annual scorecards at EU and national level to monitor progress, identify lagging regions (including remote, island, outermost and rural areas) and promote transparency, to identify and scale up good practices and business success stories documented by EIGE – such as mentoring networks, inclusive investment programmes, women’s business hubs, and peer-to-peer networks – and disseminate them in rural contexts, to propose targeted financial instruments, guarantee schemes and capacity-building initiatives based on EIGE-identified barriers (e.g. network deficits, bias in funding decisions, lack of role models) to close the implementation gap, and to provide technical support and capacity-building to national and regional authorities to integrate gender mainstreaming into entrepreneurship programmes, ensuring alignment with EIGE methodology, best practices and the Gender Equality Index framework; calls on the Commission and the Member States to collect gender-disaggregated data in order to ensure the comprehensive overview of the socio-economic position of rural women and to take the gender dimension into account when designing, implementing and evaluating policies and programmes in the field of rural development; highlights the importance of impact assessments regarding the design of such proposals in helping to achieve gender mainstreaming goals in rural areas; stresses that gender budgeting enables the identification and correction of funding gaps that disadvantage women entrepreneurs, particularly in rural, island and outermost regions; urges the inclusion of gender-disaggregated data in EU programme evaluations in order to ensure that public investment effectively supports women’s entrepreneurship and contributes to closing the gender gap in access to finance and economic opportunities;

34. Recalls that, in its special report noNo 10/2110/2021 on gender mainstreaming in the EU budget, the European Court of Auditors found that the Commission had not adequately implemented gender mainstreaming and had made insufficient use of sex-disaggregated data and indicators; highlights, in particular, that the European Court of Auditors regretted that the CAP direct payments system left ‘no scope for positive action regarding women’ and noted that there was ‘a clear need for a gender analysis of income support paid to farmers through direct payments, including income distribution and its relation with land ownership, eligible land, and recipients of payments’; notes that, as women’s farms are on average smaller than men’s, a surface-based direct payment system necessarily disadvantages women farmers; is deeply concerned that next to no improvements have been made in this regard, neither in the current CAP, nor in the draft published on 16 July 2025; calls on the Commission to implement gender-responsive budgeting across all of its programmes to ensure women and men benefit equally from public spending, including under the CAP;

87. Calls on the Commission and the Member States to apply gender budgeting principles systematically across all EU and national funding programmes that support entrepreneurship and rural development, including under the CAP and cohesion policy;