📅 8-9 July 2026
OECD Conference Centre, Paris, France
Building on the success of its inaugural 2024 edition, which addressed gender equality in the context of major global transitions, the 2026 OECD Forum on Gender Equality will focus on harnessing digital transformation to advance gender equality and ensure that its benefits are shared by all. Discussions will examine how digital technologies, data, and artificial intelligence are reshaping economies and societies, highlighting both the opportunities they create for women’s empowerment and the risks of reinforcing existing inequalities.
The Forum will explore forward-looking policies and innovative approaches to better align digital and gender strategies, strengthen online safety, and support inclusive, people-centred digital transformation that fosters stronger economic growth and social cohesion. As digital transformation accelerates across all aspects of economic and social life, gender inequalities remain a critical challenge. Women and girls continue to face structural barriers in accessing digital skills, quality jobs, leadership opportunities and technology-enabled services, while being disproportionately exposed to online harms and technology-facilitated gender-based violence. Without deliberate, gender-responsive action, the digital transformation risks deepening exclusion, discrimination, and unequal care burdens.
In this context of rapid technological change and global uncertainty, the Forum will underscore the importance of coherent, evidence-based policies to ensure that digital transformation contributes to more inclusive, resilient, and equitable societies.
Main scope & key objectives
The Forum has four strategic objectives, identified by the OECD as being decisive in closing remaining gender gaps:
- Mainstream gender equality at the highest level across policy sectors to garner national and international political support.
- Create a community of practice, building on the expertise of OECD areas of work, to facilitate policy dialogue, promote whole-of-government approaches to gender mainstreaming across sectors and identify evidence of progress.
- Facilitate finding innovative and collaborative solutions to overcome cross-cutting challenges in OECD Members and Non-Members and harness the latent potential of gender equality in building resilient and inclusive societies and promoting development.
- Enhance OECD’s efforts to strengthen the capacities, tools, and resources available to policymakers in promoting gender equality in the context of global transitions, in line with the OECD Gender Recommendations, and other OECD tools on gender equality.
