Exploring the Future of Gender Equality in Europe

From clouds to stars, an online foresight workshop mapping feminist hopes, concerns and possibilities for a more just and inclusive tomorrow.

On June 5, 2025, a team from Future Impacts, hosting the Germany Node of The Millennium Project, and the Foresight Europe Network held an online foresight workshop titled “Around the World in 15 Global Challenges: Exploring the Future of Gender Equality in Europe”. This participatory session brought together around 25 engaged participants from across Europe and beyond to examine the future of gender equality in Europe through a feminist and intersectional lens.

Drawing on the Global Challenge #11, The Status of Women, from The Millennium Project’s State of the Future, the workshop aimed to contribute to its ongoing update by exploring emerging trends, concerns, opportunities, and visions related to gender equality. Advancements in gender equality—driven by the sustained efforts of women and feminist movements worldwide to challenge patriarchal structures—have significantly contributed to broader progress over the past century. Yet, major gender gaps persist. According to current estimates, achieving full gender parity globally could take another 134 years (WEF, 2024). Within the European Union, the Gender Equality Index stands at 71 out of 100 points, reflecting a remaining gap of 29 points (EIGE, 2024).

Millions of women and individuals of marginalised gender identities and sexual orientations continue to be disproportionately affected by violence, restrictions on bodily autonomy, insufficient legal protections, unequal economic opportunities, and underrepresentation in political decision-making processes across diverse global contexts. Moreover, significant backlashes threaten to undo hard-won progress. The pandemic worsened inequalities, increasing women’s unpaid care work, unemployment, and vulnerability to violence. Reproductive rights are increasingly under attack, queer lives and identities face growing threats, and feminist and gender equality organisations and initiatives are losing crucial funding. The hard-won consensus on the importance of gender equality appears to be weakening—due in part to coordinated efforts by anti-gender movements, often supported by authoritarian governments and right-wing parties, which have contributed to the decline in global attention to these issues. Nonetheless, long-term trends suggest that gradual, transformative shifts in gender norms and stereotypes are underway. In many parts of the world, gender gaps in health and education are narrowing—offering grounds for cautious hope.

Achieving gender equality remains a systemic struggle. It requires confronting deep-rooted discrimination and shifting public discourse from victimhood to agency. This context underscores the pressing need for sustained action—through initiatives and projects that promote dialogue and foresight on gender futures and intersectional feminist agendas.

Against this backdrop, the workshop “Around the World in 15 Global Challenges: Exploring the Future of Gender Equality in Europe” engaged participants in a two-part foresight exercise designed to surface both visionary thinking and practical pathways forward. The first part, held in plenary, invited participants to co-create a Feminist Futures Constellation Map, guided by the question: What are your feminist wishes and worries for gender equality in Europe by 2050? Using visual metaphors, participants placed stars to represent hopes and wishes, clouds to symbolise worries or obstacles, and planets to highlight emerging or underexplored issues. This exercise served both as a diagnostic tool and as a source of inspiration, capturing diverse perspectives across multiple thematic areas. In the second part, participants split into smaller breakout groups to deepen the analysis. Each group selected a specific topic from the constellation map and explored it through a forward-looking, action-oriented lens. They revisited their stars, clouds, and planets, and added concrete proposals—written on post-its—outlining the steps needed to realise their feminist visions or address key risks. These included policy recommendations, institutional reforms, educational initiatives, and responsible actors—effectively bridging imagination and implementation.

Participants explored eight pre-identified themes shaping the future of gender equality in Europe by 2050: health and reproductive rights; language, culture, and education; climate and environment; queer futures and gender identity; migration and borders; geopolitics and conflict; technology and digital rights; and the economy, work, and care. Legal frameworks and rights were identified as fundamental elements underpinning and connecting all thematic areas.

The Feminist Futures Constellation Map, populated during the first phase, visually captures a wide array of feminist hopes, worries, and emerging themes for achieving gender equality in Europe by 2050. Participants shared wishes to shift dominant narratives (e.g., on climate), ensure meaningful inclusion of women and marginalized groups in decision-making (e.g., in geopolitics), and improve access to essential services (e.g., reproductive healthcare). At the same time, they expressed worries about the reinforcement of patriarchal norms through technology (e.g., AI), the persistent invisibility of certain identities (e.g., queer communities), and growing vulnerabilities in times of crisis and conflict.

Wishes (stars) ranged from systemic changes—such as building gender neutrality into AI systems, ensuring equitable access to education, and decolonizing knowledge—to more specific desires, like increasing women’s participation in tech for a sustainable future, expanding the recognition of care work, and aligning legal rights with feminist values. Worries (clouds) reflected persistent challenges: AI reinforcing traditional gender roles, disinformation, lack of transparency in digital systems, the continued invisibility of trans and non-binary people, and geopolitical instability undermining women's rights. New topics (planets) pointed to the importance of interconnected concerns, including legal systems and rights as foundational across all thematic areas. The map as a whole reflects a deep commitment to reimagining not only policy but also the cultural and technological frameworks that shape our societies—highlighting that true gender justice will require holistic, cross-sectoral transformations.

In the second phase, AI, digital rights, and technology emerged as key, cross-cutting themes for three of the four breakout groups, while the fourth group focused on the intersection of education, care, and migration.

Groups 1, 2, and 3 addressed the societal and gendered implications of AI from distinct yet complementary perspectives. Group 1 focused on how AI is reshaping human relationships, caregiving roles, and the transmission of values. Participants expressed concern that emotionally affirming yet uncritical systems may reinforce gender stereotypes and undermine traditional social functions such as education and care. The group emphasized the need for transparency in AI design and for greater involvement of women and gender-diverse individuals in technology development—reflecting broader concerns that historical gender biases are being embedded in current systems, particularly through the influence of anti-gender movement actors.

Group 2 explored “hijacking AI” as a form of feminist digital resistance, proposing guerrilla tactics like supporting click-workers and deliberately flooding AI with diverse, feminist-informed datasets to challenge dominant narratives. They emphasized the urgency of AI and gender equality literacy, and the need to reframe polarised, emotionalised, and politicised public discourse around gender. The group also called for strengthening mental health and resilience, especially for vulnerable groups facing political backlash.

Group 3 addressed digital violence and online safety, highlighting issues such as harassment, deepfakes, and child exploitation. They proposed strong legal frameworks, AI-powered ethical content moderation, and comprehensive digital education promoting critical thinking and online safety. Concerns about the growing use of AI for mental health support—especially among young people—led to recommendations for protective safeguards and EU-level ethical standards. The group also called for international collaborations on gender-inclusive AI, incorporating feminist and intersectional perspectives beyond the Global North.

Group 4, which focused on education, care, and migration, underscored that education is the foundational space where gender equality should begin. Participants noted the absence of tools and language to imagine an inclusive future and proposed a “European Gender Cool Storytelling Week” to foster mutual understanding through storytelling across schools and youth spaces. The group emphasized rethinking values as a lever for change, and encouraged relational, inclusive ways of learning and being together, especially for children growing up in diverse contexts. Their discussion reflected a broader concern with improving access to essential services and shifting dominant narratives that limit imagination around gender justice.

All in all, the workshop offered a rich, imaginative, and grounded feminist-informed foresight exercise that connected looking at long-term global trends with the identification of concrete strategies for action. By anchoring the discussion in The Millennium Project’s Global Challenge on the Status of Women, participants were able to engage critically with persistent inequalities while also envisioning pathways toward systemic transformation. The Feminist Futures Constellation Map and breakout group work revealed both the urgency and creativity of feminist futures thinking—from reimagining digital infrastructures and challenging algorithmic bias to cultivating inclusive education systems and storytelling practices that reflect diverse lived experiences.

Rather than framing gender inequality as a static or isolated problem, the workshop positioned it as a dynamic field shaped by emerging technologies, shifting values, and political tensions. Participants reaffirmed a broad consensus that gender inequality, while affecting all of us, disproportionately impacts women and people with marginalised gender identities and sexual orientations. Their proposals call for interdisciplinary collaboration, alongside intersectional, queer, and decolonial approaches rooted in collective solidarity to dismantle systemic patriarchal structures. Advancing gender equality will require not only policy reform and institutional change but also profound cultural shifts in how we relate, care, learn, and lead.

In the future, as Europe, and not only, faces rising social polarisation, democratic backsliding, and technological disruption, this work is likely to become even more difficult, making the role of those fighting for feminist futures and gender equality ever more vital and their resilience all the more necessary. Together, imagining and talking about such futures offers space for hopeful resistance. As such, this workshop served to utilise feminist-informed foresight as both a framework for reflection and a source of collective imagination—capable of informing more equitable, inclusive, and just futures for all—and hopefully inspiring more conversations of this kind.