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Twenty-five years ago, in Beijing, we committed to achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls.

The Beijing Platform for Action was a milestone.

To keep pushing for progress, I presented a new EU Gender Equality Strategy in March – for the period 2020 2025.

We will soon also present a new Gender Action Plan for the EU’s external relations.

This is an ambitious strategy to advance on equality between women and men in the years to come.

Our vision is a Europe where all women and men, girls and boys in all their diversity can thrive, lead and be free.

We have set out a number of specific actions to achieve this goal.

But to really change things, I am determined to making equality the core of all EU policies and initiatives.

This means that:

 we take an intersectional approach;

 we address gender stereotypes and bias; and

 we mainstream a gender perspective in all our policy initiatives and financial programmes.

This is more important than ever.

The coronavirus pandemic and its socio-economic consequences have magnified existing inequalities in our societies.

Women have been hard hit by the crisis.

I therefore call on all States – and international institutions – to develop strong and clear gender sensitive responses in their recovery plans.

Indeed, the Gender Equality Strategy is the EU’s gender-sensitive response.

In the Strategy, we address issues that women face on the labour-market, such as the over-representation of women in the care sector and front-line jobs.

These are often low-paid or precarious jobs.

But to value women’s contribution, we need to pay them fairly.

Fair wages and equal pay will contribute towards closing the gender pay gap.

We are shortly presenting two legislative proposals to address these problems: EU minimum wages and binding measures on pay transparency.

Pay transparency is a first but necessary step

 to detect,

 to acknowledge and

 to address the problem of pay discrimination.

But to really close the gender pay gap, EU laws are combined with other actions that:

 challenge persisting gender bias,

 break gender segregation across sectors;

 improve gender-balance in leadership; and

 allow a decent work-life balance.

So let us mark 2020 - the 25th Anniversary of Beijing – as an opportunity for advancing and leading on gender equality around the world.

Let us not be discouraged by setbacks caused by the current crisis.

Let us instead use this opportunity to set things right.

To create a resilient economy and a dynamic job market fit for the future.

Where all workers have equal rights and equal opportunities to thrive and lead at work and be free to make their own choices.

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