EU Gender Equality Strategy Overlooks Practical Action for Women and Girls with Disabilities

EU Gender Equality Strategy Overlooks Practical Action for Women and Girls with Disabilities

On 5 March 2026, the European Commission published the EU Gender Equality Strategy 2026–2030, outlining the Union’s priorities to advance gender equality over the next five years. The Strategy aims to address persistent inequalities affecting women and girls across the EU and to guide future EU legislation, funding, and policy coordination.

EPR welcomes the Strategy’s recognition that gender inequality does not occur in isolation. Notably, the Strategy adopts an intersectional approach, acknowledging that gender-based discrimination is often compounded by other factors, including disability. This recognition is an important step, as it reflects the lived realities of women and girls with disabilities, who experience multiple and intersecting forms of exclusion across many areas of life.

The Strategy is structured around 8 key principles:

• Freedom from gender-based violence
• Physical and mental health
• Equal pay and economic empowerment
• Work-life balance and care
• Equal employment opportunities
• Inclusive education and training
• Participation in public and political life
• Strong institutional mechanisms

Importantly, the Strategy acknowledges barriers faced by women with disabilities in several areas:

• Intersecting inequalities that limit access to healthcare, for instance for women with disabilities.
• A particularly pronounced gender employment gap for women with disabilities
• The need to dismantle barriers in education, especially for children with disabilities

However, while these challenges are recognised, the Strategy does not propose specific policy initiatives or concrete actions to address the barriers experienced by women and girls with disabilities. This represents a missed opportunity to ensure transformative change.

Intersectionality must go beyond words. As underlined in EPR’s Analytical Paper “Active Inclusion and Equal Opportunities for Women and Girls with disabilities“, targeted actions to ensure the equal participation and active inclusion of women and girls with disabilities, backed up by sufficient funding and monitoring mechanisms are essential to ensure that no woman or girl is left behind.

EPR calls for the Gender Equality Strategy 2026-2030 to integrate the perspective of women with disabilities in its actions. The upcoming new initiatives of the European Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2021-2030) also present an opportunity to strengthen the EU’s work towards equal employment, education and skills development for women and girls with disabilities, their access to healthcare (including sexual and reproductive healthcare), addressing violence against women with disabilities, and  the collection of key disaggregated data on gender and disability.

In particular, addressing violence against women with disabilities is a pressing issue according to the new EU Gender-based violence survey, published on 3 March by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), Eurostat and the European Institute for Gender Equality.

The report underlines striking data:

• Women with disabilities face an elevated risk of intimate partner violence during their lifetimes. They experience sexual violence by an intimate partner at a rate of 17.0 % compared with 6.6 % for women without a disability, and physical violence at a rate of 19.1 % (versus 10.6 % for women without a disability).
• The analysis reveals sociodemographic differences in women’s experiences of psychological violence by any partner. Most notably, women with disabilities face significantly higher prevalence rates, with 45.6 % of women whose usual activities are severely limited experiencing psychological violence, compared with 28.8 % of those without limitations.
• Individuals with disabilities may avoid reporting abuse by carers because they rely on them for daily support. 
• Sociodemographic characteristics of women associated with higher rates of stalking include having a disability and being a citizen of another Member State than the one where they live.

EU Gender Equality Strategy 2026-2030 available here.

Full “EU gender-based violence survey – Evidence for policy and practice” report available here.