The EU's policy on gender equality- past, present and future

Ms Karen Vandekerckhove has worked as Head of the Gender Equality Unit and Deputy Director Equality and Non-Discrimination within the European Commission's Directorate General Justice and Consumers. Ms Vandekerckhove will be speaking about the EU’s gender equality policy, it’s history and achievements, especially under the Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025, the Roadmap for Women’s Rights adopted in March 2025, and the new Strategy 2026-2030 adopted in March 2026 in an increasingly challenging political context as regards equality and non-discrimination policies.

Ms Karen Vandekerckhove studied law in Belgium at the universities of Leuven and Namur, in Germany (University of Heidelberg) and in the United States at the Harvard Law School. She has been a practicing lawyer in New York and Brussels with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton for 6 years and prepared a Ph.D in private international law at the University of Leuven. She joined the European Commission in 2004, working at the Commission’s justice department in the area of civil justice and civil judicial cooperation and gender equality. In parallel, she has been teaching at the Universities of Antwerp and Louvain-la-Neuve. Karen has worked on the preparation of the recently adopted Gender Equality Strategy 2026-2030 and on implementation of the Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025 including, among other matters, the legislative work on the EU’s accession to the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, the directives on work-life balance for parents and carers, on pay transparency (equal pay for men and women), on gender balance on company boards, and on combating violence against women and domestic violence. In this capacity, she has been in charge of the negotiations with the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, the monitoring of the application of the EU acquis, including the preparation of the European Commission’s positions in cases before the European Court of Justice. Karen has also been a European Union fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (USA) during 2019-2020 and has joined the Belgian European Union Presidency team during the first half of 2024.

This event will be moderated by our co-chair in the UK Professor Prabha Kotiswaran who is a Professor of Law and Social Justice at King's College London, she received an LLM and SJD (doctorate) from Harvard Law School.