On the 2024 budget – assessing the implementation of the gender mainstreaming methodology in the EU budget

MOTION FOR A EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT RESOLUTION

on the 2024 budget – assessing the implementation of the gender mainstreaming methodology in the EU budget

(2025/2033(INI))

The European Parliament,

– having regard to Articles 2 and 3 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU),

– having regard to Articles 8, 10 and 19 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU),

– having regard to Articles 21 and 23 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union,

– having regard to the revised Council Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2024/765 of 29 February 2024 amending Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2020/2093 laying down the multiannual financial framework for the years 2021 to 2027 (MFF Revision),

– having regard to Council Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2022/2496 of 15 December 2022 amending Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2020/2093 laying down the multiannual financial framework for the years 2021 to 2027,

– having regard to Council Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2020/2093 of 17 December 2020 laying down the multiannual financial framework for the years 2021 to 2027,

– having regard to its resolution of 3 October 2023 on the proposal for a mid-term revision of the multiannual financial framework 2021-2027,

– having regard to the Interinstitutional Agreement of 16 December 2020 between the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission on budgetary discipline, on cooperation in budgetary matters and on sound financial management, as well as on new own resources, including a roadmap towards the introduction of new own resources and in particular point 16(f) thereof,

– having regard to Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2024/2509 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 September 2024 on the financial rules applicable to the general budget of the Union (recast) and in particular Article 33 thereof,

– having regard to the Commission staff working document of 3 November 2021 entitled ‘Better Regulation Guidelines’ (SWD(2021)0305),

– having regard to the Commission communication of 5 March 2020 entitled ‘A Union of Equality: Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025’ (COM(2020)0152),

– having regard to the 2025 report of the European Commission on gender equality in the EU,

– having regard to the Commission communication of 7 March 2025 entitled ‘A Roadmap for Women’s Rights’ (COM(2025)0097),

– having regard to its resolution of 21 January 2021 on the EU Strategy for Gender Equality,

– having regard to its resolution of 10 March 2022 on gender mainstreaming in the European Parliament – annual report 2020,

– having regard to its resolution of 2 April 2025 on general guidelines for the preparation of the 2026 budget, Section III – Commission,

– having regard to its resolution of 7 May 2025 on a revamped long-term budget for the Union in a changing world,

– having regard to the Commission’s statement of estimates for the financial year 2026 of 4 June 2025 (SEC(2025)0250),

– having regard to the programme performance statements of operational expenditure included in the working document part I of 4 June 2025 accompanying the draft general budget of the European Union for the financial year 2026 (COM(2025)0300),

– having regard to the Commission’s 2021 Annual Management and Performance Report for the EU Budget (COM(2022)0401),

– having regard to the Commission’s 2022 Annual Management and Performance Report for the EU Budget (COM(2023)0401),

– having regard to the Commission’s 2023 Annual Management and Performance Report for the EU Budget (COM(2024)0401),

– having regard to the Commission’s 2024 Annual Management and Performance Report for the EU Budget (COM(2025)0824),

– having regard to Special Report 10/2021 of the European Court of Auditors of 26 May 2021 entitled ‘Gender mainstreaming in the EU budget: time to turn words into action’,

– having regard to the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) briefing of February 2025 entitled ‘Gender-responsive budgeting: State of play and opportunities for the European Parliament’s 10th term’,

– having regard to the workshop of 25 June 2025 requested by the Committee on Budgetary Control entitled ‘Implementation of the gender mainstreaming methodology in the EU budget’,

– having regard to the written answers provided by the then Commissioner-designate for Budget, Anti-Fraud and Public Administration during the period of confirmation hearings in 2024,

– having regard to the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (1995),

– having regard to the final report of the Group of Specialists on Gender Budgeting of the Council of Europe (2005),

– having regard to the activities of the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) and its publications,

– having regard to Rule 55 of its Rules of Procedure,

– having regard to the report of the Committee on Budgetary Control (A10-0000/2025),

A. whereas gender equality is an objective of the Union enshrined in its primary law and a principle that should be at the core of all Union policies;

B. whereas gender mainstreaming is a globally recognised strategy to ensure the integration of a gender perspective when designing, implementing and evaluating all policies, programmes and measures, in order to promote gender equality and combat discrimination;

C. whereas gender budgeting is defined by the Council of Europe as being a gender-based assessment of budgets incorporating a gender perspective at all levels of the budgetary process and restructuring revenues and expenditure in order to promote gender equality;

D. whereas the EIGE describes gender budgeting as a tool which allows policymakers to promote accountability and transparency, to increase the balanced participation of all genders in the budget process and to advance gender equality;

E. whereas the European Court of Auditors has pointed out that the Union’s 2014-2020 multiannual financial framework (MFF) did not adequately take gender equality into account;

F. whereas the integration of gender equality as a horizontal priority in the budget of the Union is a long-standing issue of concern both in the Committee on Budgetary Control and in Parliament and is considered a key criterion with which to assess the implementation of the Union’s budget and its sound financial management;

G. whereas gender budgeting is a prerequisite to achieve gender equality and gender equality is in itself a condition for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth, including within the Union, where the EIGE has shown through a robust econometric model applied to the specific context of the Union that improving gender equality would result in a series of macroeconomic benefits in several areas such as education, labour market activity and wages; whereas the EIGE has also shown that gender equality has in general a strong, positive impact on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and that improving gender equality would lead to an increase in the EU’s GDP per capita of at least 6.1 % and up to 9.6 % by 2050, which amounts to EUR 1.95 trillion and EUR 3.15 trillion respectively;

H. whereas there has been a concerning decline in Member States’ efforts to implement gender mainstreaming since 2021, which should not be mirrored at Union level;

I. whereas the systematic integration of ex ante gender equality impact assessments and mitigation measures into the Union’s policymaking processes is necessary to ensure that future initiatives do not unintentionally worsen gender equality;

J. whereas democratic institutions must reflect the diversity of society, most importantly in the composition of their staff;

K. whereas gender balance remains an unachieved objective at numerous, crucial levels of decision-making;

L. whereas the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action calls for the integration of a gender perspective into budgetary decisions at all levels, and the European Union is committed to applying its principles, particularly to ensure that public resources contribute effectively to gender equality and women’s empowerment across all policy areas;

General remarks

1. Welcomes the fact that in line with its binding commitments, and following Parliament’s repeated calls, the Commission has developed a pilot methodology to track and measure expenditure related to gender equality at programme level in the 2021-2027 MFF, with a view to improving gender mainstreaming in the Commission’s budget process and enhancing how policy design and resource allocation advance gender equality objectives;

2. Notes that under the current methodology, the Commission assigns different scores to programmes based on an assessment of their contribution to gender equality at the most granular level of intervention possible, giving a score of:

a) 2 to interventions of which the principal objective is to improve gender equality;

b) 1 to interventions that have gender equality as an important and deliberate objective but not as the main reason for the intervention;

c) 0 to non-targeted interventions, in other words, interventions that are expected to have no significant bearing on gender equality;

d) 0* to interventions with a likely but as yet unclear positive impact on gender equality;

On the implementation of the methodology developed by the Commission

3. Notes that the methodology was used for the first time in the process of drafting the estimates for the EU budget for the financial year 2023, accompanied by a retroactive application to the budgets of the financial years 2021 and 2022;

4. Notes that the methodology is built on the basis of the gender equality policy marker developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is a qualitative statistical tool to monitor and record development activities that target gender equality as a policy objective and is applied by the Commission to all Union budget spending programmes under shared, direct and indirect management;

5. Notes that for the financial year 2021, at the time of the publication of the related Annual Management Performance Report and out of EUR 352 billion in commitments, 1 % of commitments had received a score of 2, 3 % had received a score of 1, 1 % had received a score of 0 and 95 % had received a score of 0*;

6. Notes that for the financial year 2022, at the time of the publication of the related Annual Management Performance Report and out of EUR 321 billion in commitments, 2 % of commitments had received a score of 2, 9 % had received a score of 1, 16 % had received a score of 0 and 73 % had received a score of 0*;

7. Notes that for the financial year 2023, at the time of the publication of the related Annual Management Performance Report and out of EUR 427 billion in commitments, 2 % of commitments had received a score of 2, 9 % had received a score of 1, 69 % had received a score of 0 and 20 % had received a score of 0*;

8. Notes that for the financial year 2024, at the time of the publication of the related Annual Management Performance Report and out of EUR 195 billion in commitments, 3 % of commitments had received a score of 2, 17 % had received a score of 1, 65 % had received a score of 0 and 16 % had received a score of 0*, these scores being rounded-up;

9. Understands that the decreasing share of commitments with a score of 0* over the years is the result of an improvement in the Commission’s reporting capacity, allowing its directorates-general to better measure the contribution of their programmes to gender equality at a more granular level;

10. Further understands that due to the limited capacity for reporting during the first financial years to which this methodology was applied, there is little added value in comparing numbers from one financial year to another based on the yearly results or in drawing insights from such comparisons;

11. Notes that the Commission considers that interventions with an attributed score of 2 or 1 can be considered as promoting gender equality and that considering this, interventions worth EUR 37.99 billion promoted gender equality in 2024, whereas that figure stood at EUR 10.76 billion in 2021, EUR 37.83 billion in 2022 and EUR 47.99 billion in 2023;

12. Notes that the decrease in absolute value between 2023 and 2024 of interventions considered to promote gender equality is a direct result of the decrease in the total amount of commitments between those two financial years, largely explained by the phase-out of commitments under the Recovery and Resilience Facility;

13. Notes that in addition to the results provided for each financial year, in the 2024 Annual Management and Performance Report for the EU Budget the Commission published a reassessment of all the previous results based on more recent and comprehensive assessments of its programmes, which resulted in aggregate trends indicating that for interventions over the period 2021 to 2024, 2 % were given a score of 2, 10 % were given a score of 1, 83 % were given a score of 0 and 5 % were given a score of 0*; further notes that according to the Commission’s reassessment, in total, in the financial years 2021-2024, 12 % of EU budget expenditure contributed to the promotion of gender (with scores of 1 and 2), amounting to EUR 158.4 billion;

14. Stresses that not all Union budget programmes perform equally in terms of the integration of gender as a horizontal priority, with some programmes performing much better due to their policy design, such as programmes under Heading 6 ‘Neighbourhood and the World’ where gender has been established as a cross-cutting priority with clear targets and criteria, and specific programmes under other headings such as Horizon Europe, which, thanks to its requirement to implement gender budgeting, not only fosters gender equality but also positively impacts the practices of Member States through cross-contamination during the implementation stage at national level;

15. Regrets that as the methodology used is a tracking tool designed specifically for operational budgets, it cannot assess the administrative budgets of the Union institutions and bodies adequately;

16. Regrets that the methodology is a limited tool that cannot properly account for programmes’ secondary effects on gender equality, programmes’ potential negative impacts on gender equality, or other societal factors needed for an intersectional analysis of policy impacts;

17. Further regrets that the potential negative impacts of programmes on gender equality are not taken into account, especially given the poor contributions to gender equality reported for programmes in sectors such as competitiveness, defence and preparedness;

18. Regrets that the ex post nature of the methodology renders it incapable of structurally influencing the design of policies at an ex-ante stage or the collection and allocation of financial resources, which is essential to mainstreaming gender equality properly in Union programmes;

On the broader approach to gender mainstreaming in Union financial programmes

19. Notes that beyond the gender mainstreaming methodology applied to the Union budget, certain Union programmes have gender equality mainstreamed in their legal bases while others do not;

20. Notes that while the Commission’s dual approach to gender mainstreaming, which is split between tracking the Union budget and establishing the objectives set out in the programmes’ legal bases, is a useful framework, this approach is fragmented and does not impact all programmes to the same extent, therefore reducing the coherence of the Union’s approach to gender equality;

Concluding remarks

21. Shares the view that for the remaining years of the 2021-2027 MFF, the priority should be to continue to evaluate programmes at the most granular level possible to better assess their contribution to gender equality and draw lessons on their implementation, making good use of the enhanced gender disaggregated data reporting in place since 2023;

22. Regrets that despite being a useful tool to reflect on the contribution of the Union budget to gender equality, the methodology developed by the Commission faces structural limitations that reduce its capacity to have a transformative effect, a situation which cannot be left unchanged;

23. Underlines that as the Union’s budget is being affected by multiple crises and shifts in political priorities, it is essential for gender budgeting to be built into the core of the budgetary cycle of programmes ex ante, including in new priority areas such as competitiveness, defence and preparedness;

24. Calls on the Commission to develop a fully fledged and comprehensive approach to gender budgeting and a specific and comprehensive methodology for the Union budget, to be fully operationalised as early as the start of the next programming period with a transformative potential enabled by its capacity to influence the entirety of the budgetary cycle and by tackling the issues identified in this resolution, so as to ensure the sound financial management of Union funds;

25. Insists that in addition to the MFF, any instrument adopted under Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union should also ensure solid gender mainstreaming and budgeting provisions, whereas in the past this has not always been the case, which may lead to deficiencies in the implementation of programmes under indirect management;

26. Calls on the Commission to conduct ex ante impact assessments that also analyse the specific impacts of Union policies on gender equality, in line with the Better Regulation Guidelines;

27. Calls on the Commission to ensure that no legislative proposals should be adopted if their ex ante impact assessments demonstrably indicate that they would contribute to a decrease in gender equality within the Union;

28. Urges the Commission to establish a ‘gender equality safeguard mechanism’ as a standard part of the Union’s legislative procedures, which would require the mandatory suspension or revision of any proposal that, through clear indicators or through the analysis of the Court of Auditors, is shown to undermine the Union’s gender equality strategy and objectives;

29. Regrets the imbalance of gender representation among officials and political representation at both Union and Member State levels, which in turn undermines the principle of gender equality in representation;

30. Calls on the Commission to assess the feasibility of introducing further gender equality parity measures at management level, as well as the feasibility of creating quotas for all genders to be sufficiently involved in policymaking through targeted support schemes;

31. Calls on the Commission to ensure that a legally binding minimum share of the EU budget is dedicated to gender equality as a principal objective (corresponding to score 2 in the current methodology);

32. Calls on the Commission to consider including a legally binding quantitative target in the next programming period for a share of the EU budget that is to contribute to promoting gender equality (corresponding either to a score of 2 or 1 in the current methodology), as such targets have proved useful for the mainstreaming of the Union’s climate and biodiversity objectives;

33. Calls on the Commission and the Council to respect the provisions set out in the revised Financial Regulation during the negotiations on the next generation of programmes, namely that programmes and activities should, where feasible and appropriate in accordance with the relevant sector-specific rules, be implemented taking into account the principle of gender equality and in accordance with an appropriate gender mainstreaming methodology;

34. Calls on the Commission, also in line with the revised Financial Regulation, to ensure that the next generation of programmes be negotiated on the basis of proposals which include objectives that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound, as well as indicators that are relevant, accepted, credible, easy, robust and based on widely recognised scientific evidence, noting that where appropriate, the data collected in relation to such indicators should be broken down by gender and collected in a way that allows for aggregation of such data across all relevant programmes;

35. Calls on all relevant actors, including the Council, the Commission, civil society organisations and other relevant partners, to strive to make gender budgeting a reality in the next programming period;

36. Calls on the Commission to dedicate at least 90 % of all EU external actions to interventions that contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment and further dedicate 25 % of the EU’s external financing instruments in the upcoming MFF to promoting gender equality as a principal objective; further calls on the Commission to establish a dedicated fund to promote gender equality globally and ensure that the actions it supports focus on access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, increasing women’s participation in decision-making, supporting local women-led non-governmental organisations, and assisting local women human rights defenders;

37. Calls on the Commission to set clear objectives for the next MFF in terms of contributing to narrowing the gender pay and pension gaps, and addressing the issue of women’s poverty, including through improved childcare services;

38. Recognises that the gender pay gap continues to be a significant issue in the EU institutions; urges the Commission to conduct a thorough investigation to identify areas within these institutions where the gap is particularly wide and calls on the Commission to implement measures to ensure that the institutions uphold the principles they advocate and to set the goal of eliminating the gender pay gap within the institutions by 2030;

39. Recognises the persistent gender disparities in traditionally male-dominated sectors, such as nuclear energy, defence, and energy-intensive industries; calls on the Commission to ensure that gender budgeting be applied as a corrective and transformative instrument in order to ensure that resource allocation in these industries actively contributes to gender equality;

40. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council and the Commission.

EXPLANATORY STATEMENT

The promotion of gender equality is an objective of the Union enshrined in the Treaties. Ensuring the integration of gender equality as a horizontal priority in the EU budget has been a long-time priority for the European Parliament.

Gender budgeting can serve as a key tool for promoting gender equality by focusing on how public resources are collected and spent. For the 2021-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), the European Commission has developed, for the first time, a methodology to track EU expenditure related to gender equality at the programme level. The methodology was first applied across all spending programmes for the 2021 financial year, in preparation for the 2023 draft budget. Applying this methodology, the Commission has assessed that the majority of EU spending in 2021-2024 either had no significant impact on gender equality (83%) or its effect could not be assessed (5%). Over the past four years, 12 % of EU budget expenditure has contributed to the promotion of gender equality.

The recast of the Financial Regulation has introduced new requirements related to integrating of gender equality principles in the EU budget. The new Financial Regulation, applicable since 30 September 2024, requires that gender equality should be taken into account in the sector-specific rules through a gender mainstreaming methodology and that, where appropriate, the indicators used for EU spending programmes should be broken down by gender and should be collected in a way allowing for aggregation of such data across all relevant programmes.

The negotiations for the post-2027 MFF present an opportunity to reinforce the integration of gender equality in the EU budget. Drawing on the lessons from the implementation of the gender mainstreaming methodology in the EU budget for the financial years 2021-2024, the aim of this own initiative report is to provide insights and recommendations on how the contribution of the EU budget to gender equality could be better measured and how gender equality principles could be better integrated in the next MFF.

To ensure that the EU fulfils its treaty obligation of promoting gender equality, a fully-fledged and comprehensive gender budgeting methodology should be developed for the post-2027 MFF. This methodology should be integrated throughout the entire budget cycle from planning to evaluation, with clear objectives and using gender-disaggregated data, whenever possible, as required by the 2024 Financial Regulation. The new methodology should account for the secondary effects and any potential negative impacts that the EU budget might have on gender equality. Other, broader societal factors should also be taken into account in the methodology to facilitate an intersectional and gender-sensitive analysis of the impact of the EU budget. Furthermore, to ensure that the EU dedicates an appropriate amount of resources to achieving progress towards gender equality, EU-level spending targets in relation to the promotion of gender equality should be set.