Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025: First Steps towards a Practical Implementation

In December 2019, Ursula von der Leyen was elected a new President of the European Commission, who commenced to promote the agenda for advancing gender equality. The Gender Equality Strategy 2020.2025 was presented in March 2020 by the European Commission. It aims at achieving a gender equal Europe by eliminating gender-based violence, sex discrimination and structural inequality between women and men. The implementation of this strategy will be based on a dual approach of targeted measures to accomplish gender equality, combined with the gender mainstreaming and the principle of intersectionality. The author touches upon a set of key actions of gender policy designated in the relevant paper. In addition, this article reveals disputes between the EU Member States regarding the concept of gender equality. In particular, it refers to Poland and Hungary, which have become the "non-aligned movement's" leaders regarding the EU-wide gender policy. The purpose of the study is to examine strategic areas of the Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025. The article also highlights the impact of the EU's gender agenda on the Western Balkan countries under the enlargement policy. It primarily refers to the candidate countries (Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia) which are conducting EU accession negotiations.