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European Commission - Speech [Check Against Delivery] Speech by Commissioner Lahbib at the OECD Gender Equality Forum Paris, 9 July 2026 Imagine being a 15-year-old girl. Someone copies a photo from your social media profile. They upload it to an AI app. Minutes later, explicit images of you are racing across the Internet to friends, family, complete strangers. Images you never agreed to and that you cannot take back...
European Commission - Speech [Check Against Delivery] Speech by Commissioner Lahbib at the OECD Gender Equality Forum Paris, 9 July 2026 Imagine being a 15-year-old girl. Someone copies a photo from your social media profile. They upload it to an AI app. Minutes later, explicit images of you are racing across the Internet to friends, family, complete strangers. Images you never agreed to and that you cannot take back. This is not science fiction. It is happening to girls and women across Europe and across the world. Countless lives thrown into despair. In the EU, one in five women has experienced online violence. Among young women, it is one in four. This could be your daughter, your sister, your colleague, silenced, humiliated, pushed out of public life. That is what "Harnessing the Digital Transformation for All" looks like in real life for too many women and girls today. Digital technology is bursting with potential. Creating opportunity and tearing down walls that have held women back for generations. But without the right guardrails, it can also destroy a life in seconds. Digital technology is not automatically fair. We have to build it that way. Our aspiration is for the European Union to remain a lighthouse for women's rights across the world. We recently adopted our Gender Equality Strategy for the next five years, and we made a clear choice: digital transformation is a top priority. If women and girls are shut out of digital skills and digital leadership, every inequality we are trying to fix gets worse, not better. We have a clear goal: to build a Europe that works for everyone in the digital age, not just a select few. Here is how we are doing that. We are making online spaces fairer and safer. For people to participate, they must feel safe. For too many women, going online means stepping into a dangerous Wild West of stalking, harassment, hate speech, and image-based abuse. Women activists, journalists, and politicians are targeted because they are visible. The goal is to push us out. I know this personally. As journalist, Foreign Minister, and European Commissioner, I have faced it every day just like many of you. But we are pushing back. Our Directive on Violence against Women tackles cyber violence directly, and we are enforcing the Digital Services Act to hold platforms accountable. Through Horizon Europe , we are funding research into how anti-gender disinformation spreads and how to stop it. Men and boys are part of this too. The toxic narratives pulling young men toward hatred and misogyny are real and well-funded, so we are confronting them in schools, communities, and with civil society. This brings me to the technology defining this moment: Artificial Intelligence. Trillions of dollars are flowing into AI across the world. This is not just a system upgrade. It is a Big Bang moment. A rupture in how we work, how we live, and how power is distributed. It can be a real breakthrough for women. AI can help detect diseases earlier, tailor healthcare to women's needs, and open new markets for women entrepreneurs. The potential is vast but only if women help shape it from the start. That is a big “if”. AI trained on biased data produces biased outcomes. The data on AI-generated abuse is stark: 98% of AI-manipulated images are pornographic. 99% of those depict women. The European Union is taking action against this. Our AI Act bans manipulative and deceptive AI and requires platforms to remove illegal content. It is designed to root out gender bias in algorithms. Last month, we went further by banning nudification apps. Any AI system that generates intimate images of a real person without their consent is now prohibited from the EU market. Providers have until December to bring their systems in line. The message is simple: No technology can override your body, your image, your consent. And we will enforce it. But laws alone are not enough. We also need women building these technologies. If women are missing from the design table, bias gets coded into the system and then scaled up globally. Technology is never neutral. It reflects human choices about power and about who matters most. In Europe, we have made our choice: rights first, fairness built in from the start. And because of the size of our market, these are not just European rules, they can help set the global standard. Safety is necessary, but it is not enough. We need women in the rooms where digital decisions are made, in STEM, in AI research, and in tech boardrooms. There are still too few women, and this has consequences for the technology we all use. So we are launching an Action Plan on Women in Research, Innovation and Startups to get more women in the lab and in the boardroom. Our goal is to make Europe the top destination for women in these fields by 2030. Our Girls Go STEM initiative has a concrete target: one million girls in STEM careers by 2028. None of us can do this alone. The OECD produces reliable data on what works. The EU turns evidence into policy for our 450 million people. That is a powerful partnership, and we should deepen it. Together we can build AI governance that works for women, strengthens women's digital inclusion, tackles online violence, and makes sure the digital economy creates opportunities instead of widening inequalities. Allow me to end where I began, with that 15-year-old girl. She did not ask to be part of this conversation, but she is, and so are millions like her. The technology to destroy her childhood exists now. But so do the laws, the standards, and the partnerships that can stop it. The only question is: do we have the will to use them? Today we must ask ourselves: what kind of digital world are we building for this young woman? A world where any stranger can weaponise her image in seconds? Or one where her ideas and her ambition are what define her future? That is our choice today. Let's make sure we get it right. SPEECH/26/1575
Speech Brief