For all its lofty rhetoric about equality and fundamental rights, the European Union remains a house divided when it comes to gender, and the rights of women.
From unequal pay and workplace discrimination to shrinking access to reproductive healthcare and rising gender-based violence, many of the most basic protections women should expect as EU citizens are being undermined—often in plain sight and with political approval.
Take the question of pay. It is now over 60 years since the founding Treaty of Rome committed member states to equal pay for equal work. Yet the gender pay gap across the EU still hovers stubbornly above 13 per cent, with the pension gap more than double that.
Women in countries like Germany and Austria earn significantly less than their male peers, especially in lower-paid, feminised professions such as nursing, childcare, and retail. Efforts by Brussels to correct this—such as the 2023 Pay Transparency Directive—have produced more headlines than results. In practice, many employers skirt reporting rules, and enforcement by national authorities is patchy at best.
But the real battle lines are not only economic. They are moral and political. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the growing confrontation over reproductive rights.
In Poland, a near-total abortion ban remains in effect after the Constitutional Tribunal ruled in 2020 that abortions due to foetal abnormalities—then the basis of over 90 per cent of legal terminations—were unconstitutional. The result has been both predictable and tragic: women dying of sepsis in hospitals as doctors delay intervention, fearful of prosecution.
Meanwhile, thousands have been forced to seek abortions abroad or order pills illegally online. The Polish government, now nominally more liberal under Donald Tusk, has promised change—but action has been glacial. And in other parts of Eastern Europe, from Hungary to Croatia, access to abortion is being steadily eroded through administrative hurdles, mandatory “counselling”, and the stigmatisation of doctors who perform the procedure.
Western capitals, for all their liberal posturing, are not immune to failure either. Across the bloc, sex education remains wildly inconsistent. In conservative regions, schools avoid mentioning contraception altogether. Where it is taught, abstinence is often encouraged as the primary solution. In rural areas and among marginalised communities such as the Roma, access to maternal healthcare is shockingly poor. Cases of forced sterilisation, though now rare, still surface from time to time.
Meanwhile, the problem of violence against women has reached what campaigners rightly call pandemic proportions. Around one in three women in Europe have experienced physical or sexual violence, according to the latest figures. Yet prosecutions are scarce, support services are underfunded, and the data collection is often non-existent. In some countries, women who report domestic abuse are still turned away from shelters or pressured into reconciliation. Courts drag their feet; restraining orders go unenforced.
This brings us to the Istanbul Convention, a treaty drawn up by the Council of Europe to tackle violence against women and domestic abuse. Most EU states have signed and ratified it, but not all. Hungary, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia remain outside its framework. Poland has repeatedly threatened to withdraw, on the spurious grounds that the treaty promotes “gender ideology”—a term that has become a favourite bogeyman of Eastern European populists and Catholic conservatives.
Of course, it is not just in Warsaw or Budapest that one hears such arguments. Across the continent, gender equality is increasingly framed as a cultural imposition by the EU’s liberal elite. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government banned university-level gender studies in 2018.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration speaks the language of family and tradition while quietly defunding women’s health initiatives. Even in France and Germany, protests on women’s rights can be met with suspicion by police and public authorities.
It is no coincidence that this regression is taking place amid a broader backlash against the post-1989 liberal order. As voters grow restless with immigration, inflation, and EU overreach, populist parties have seized upon gender as a wedge issue. Women’s rights are rebranded as elite obsessions, out of touch with “real” national values. That this rhetoric dovetails so neatly with authoritarian instincts is not surprising. Where judicial independence falters, minority rights usually follow. And women, in this sense, are the canaries in Europe’s democratic coal mine.
Still, not all is bleak. Countries like Spain, Sweden, and the Netherlands continue to lead the way on gender equality. Spain, for instance, has enshrined the right to abortion in law and mandated paternity leave as part of its broader strategy to tackle the care burden.
France has introduced legal tracking of so-called “feminicides”—murders of women by partners or ex-partners—and aims to double the number of shelter beds by 2026. The EU itself has launched a raft of initiatives, including the Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025 and the recent Gender-Based Violence Directive. But as with many things in Brussels, these are tools, not guarantees.
In truth, the biggest challenge is not legal—it is political. EU law can prohibit discrimination, but it cannot compel courage. It cannot make governments value women’s autonomy if they do not believe in it. Nor can it restore trust where institutions have failed. Too often, victims of abuse are re-traumatised by courts that treat them as unreliable narrators, or by police forces more concerned with procedural form than human safety.
Europe, we are told, is a beacon of human rights. But a beacon that flickers depending on your postcode is not much use in the dark. If the EU is serious about being a community of values, it must do more than pass resolutions. It must enforce its standards, with funding, legal action, and—if necessary—political pressure. Otherwise, it risks becoming what many already suspect it is: a union of convenience, not conviction.
Gender equality is not a side issue. It is a test of whether Europe can live up to the promises it makes not only to women—but to itself.
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“Baroness Louise Casey ran an investigation into the Met, and she issued a scathing report, saying drastic action was needed,” said Brunel University London Honorary Professor, Steven Pickering.
“But our research suggests that public trust in the Met is even lower than Baroness Casey found. This is especially pronounced among women and ethnic minorities.”
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