About the workshop:
On 5 June 2025, we, as the German Node of The Millennium Project in cooperation with the Foresight Europe Network, hosted a 1.5-hour online workshop focused on exploring the future of gender equality in Europe from a feminist and intersectional perspective. Around 25 participants from across Europe and beyond contributed to the session.
The workshop drew from one of the 15 Global Challenges on this topic, as featured in the State of the Future Report by The Millennium Project, on the changing status of women, which covers current developments as well as future perspectives and regional insights from around the world. The session contributed to updating this particular Global Challenge.
Designed as a collaborative space for reflection, the workshop invited participants to critically engage with futures of gender equality in Europe. It concluded with an optional informal networking session to further connect and exchange ideas.
Participants were guided by the following key questions and exercises:
- What are your feminist wishes (and worries) for gender equality in Europe by 2050? In a plenary session, participants co-created a Feminist Futures Constellation Map. They added stars for wishes, clouds for worries, and planets for new topics relevant to the future of gender equality in Europe.
- What would be needed – and which steps are necessary (and by whom) – for realising the wishes and averting/addressing the worries? In breakout groups, participants selected a specific future topic from the first exercise to explore further. They continued to add stars for wishes, clouds for worries, and additionally added post-its to suggest concrete actions and responsible actors.
Overarching findings:
- Out of the four groups, three chose to focus on the future of “AI, digital rights & technology,” identifying it as one of the most disruptive areas for feminist futures, while one group explored issues at the intersection of “Education, care, and migration”.
- Participants focusing on AI highlighted the need for gender-sensitive and ethical AI development, expressing concerns about the reproduction of historical gender biases within current systems, particularly via anti-gender movement actors. They also expressed concern about the amplification of anti-feminist content within global digital spaces. Proposed measures included employing diverse and inclusive data sets, ensuring women and gender-diverse individuals occupy decision-making roles in technology, and promoting transparency and accountability throughout AI development processes.
- The concept of hijacking AI emerged as a form of feminist digital resistance, encompassing guerrilla tactics such as unions supporting click-workers and deliberate efforts to flood AI systems with more diverse, feminist-informed datasets (e.g., feminist literature, records of women´s history) in order to challenge prevailing statistics and dominant narratives.
- Digital violence and online safety were identified as urgent issues, particularly concerning harassment, deepfakes, and child sexual exploitation. Participants called for strong legal frameworks, ethical AI-powered content moderation, and comprehensive educational initiatives to increase awareness of digital safety across all age groups.
- The evolving nature of human relationships mediated by AI was another key topic discussed, with concerns that AI may increasingly mediate or even replace interpersonal connections, especially in intimate or emotional contexts. Considering the gender dimension, there is a risk that anti-feminist views in partner relationships may be reinforced. Participants also emphasised the risks associated with AI in mental health settings, particularly for young people seeking psychological support from AI. Discussions pointed to the need to advocate for human oversight, protective safeguards, EU-level ethical guidelines, and educational programmes that foster critical thinking across different age groups.
- Participants discussed how AI changes the way values related to gender and equality are taught, especially to children. They underscored the urgent need for new tools and narratives that support more inclusive, relational ways of learning and being together. A prominent proposal was the establishment of a European Gender Cool Storytelling Week, to be held in schools and other settings, aimed at fostering mutual understanding and connection through storytelling.
- Participants stressed the importance of strengthening mental health, coping strategies, and resilience, particularly among immigrants, vulnerable groups, and activists, anticipating increased challenges in the face of potential political shifts towards more conservative, populist, or far-right governments in Europe.
- Finally, participants highlighted the urgent need to reframe the public discourse around gender equality, noting that it is frequently polarised, emotionalised, and politicised. This environment makes it challenging to engage with factual information or recognise the broader societal benefits of advancing gender justice.
A document with the full documentation is available for download.
Thanks to the facilitators Clara Jöster-Morisse and Cornelia Daheim from the German Node of the Millennium Project / Future Impacts & Thays Prado and Lena Tünkers from the Foresight Europe Network & Dr. Efrat Tzadik, for making this workshop possible!
Details on the plenary exercise: Creating A Feminist Futures Constellation Map
Key discussion points:
- Pre-identified topics relevant to the future of gender equality in Europe by 2050: Health, bodily autonomy, and reproductive rights; Language, culture, and education; Climate and environment; Queer futures and gender identity; Migration and borders; Geopolitics, peace, and conflict; Technology, AI, and digital rights; Economy, work, and care.
- Legal systems and rights were identified as a cross-cutting issue underpinning all of these topics.
- Wishes included, for example, shifting dominant narratives (e.g., concerning climate and the environment), ensuring the meaningful inclusion of women and marginalised groups in decision-making (e.g., in geopolitics), and improving access to essential services (e.g., reproductive healthcare).
- Worries encompassed, for example, the risk of reinforcing patriarchal structures through technological developments (e.g., AI), the continued invisibility of specific needs and topics (e.g., queer identities), and increased vulnerabilities in crisis and conflict settings.
Details on the group exercises: Aligning the Stars: Navigating Feminist Wishes & Worries into Futures
Key discussion points, Group 1:
- How far does AI go? We are only beginning to grasp its implications.
- AI is reshaping not only human-machine interactions but also relationships between people. Romantic and social bonds may be replaced by AI, affirming users uncritically, e.g., with regards to gender stereotypes and roles, “AI tells you what you want to hear”. At the same time, digitalisation can connect people, e.g., across language barriers.
- AI reshapes how values are taught, challenging traditional caregiving roles, such as women helping with homework, and raising questions about how and by whom values are taught in the future.
- AI generates vast, and often inaccurate, amounts of information. Anti-feminist and anti-democratic misinformation is growing, making it harder to judge credibility and raising concerns about who is still seen as an expert.
- Biases in AI and Digital Content: AI is never neutral. Transparency about data, design, and values is essential. More women and diverse actors must be involved in AI development – though inclusion alone is not enough.
Key discussion points, Group 2:
- The vision to hijack AI (and potentially other IT-based tools), e.g. starting from a more widespread general AI literacy as well as gender equality literacy, so that issues of gender in the space of AI are understood by more people & the possibility of guerilla tactics, e.g., by unions supporting click-workers, and drawing from the image of “flooding AI with good”, and to flood the internet and large language models with data by women to change the statistics.
- Changing of the narrative around gender equality, e.g. relating to the concern that the discourse is easily polarized, emotionalized, politicized, so that facts and also benefits from moving towards more gender equality are easily ignored or “drowned” & the need to understand better what triggers are in debates, how mechanisms of perceived loss work (“Others get more rights = I have less” etc.)
- Supporting mental health, coping and resilience (as an active change-oriented skill) of immigrants specifically and the most vulnerable groups, but also e.g. of activists (which would become more important if e.g. more European governments become conservative to populist (or even far-right) in the next years).
Key discussion points, Group 3:
- AI systems often reproduce gender biases due to non-inclusive data and design processes. Addressing this requires diverse datasets, gender-inclusive teams, strategies to counter stereotypes, and tools like diversity filters and inclusive education.
- Online harassment, deep fakes, and child sexual exploitation disproportionately affect women and vulnerable groups.
- As people increasingly seek mental health support from AI, especially youth, concerns grow over dependency and safety. Safeguards and human oversight are essential.
- Proposed Actions: Develop EU-level legal and ethical AI frameworks; ensure gender-diverse leadership in tech; create age-appropriate educational programmes and promote critical thinking; increase transparency and accountability in AI development; establish international collaborations for gender-inclusive AI, with a feminist intersectional perspective, and with cultural representation and diversity that goes beyond Global North perspectives; and establish open platforms for dialogue to inform inclusive policy-making.
Key discussion points, Group 4:
- Focus on the future of education, care & migration.
- Education is where gender equality should start! We often lack the language to imagine and articulate a world in which it’s a given.
We need new tools at the very fundamental level (it’s not easy) - Rethinking values could change a lot in society
- Main actions that were discussed: A European Gender Cool Storytelling Week in Schools (& places outside of schools e.g. communities, youth groups, summer schools, social media)
- Spaces of Relationality that are offering other ways of being and relating with each other away from the binary. “We are all different (you eat pork, I am are vegan) and we can still play and tell stories together”.
- We should move away from right-wrong thinking and embrace diversity and inclusion.
