European Parliament in Nutshell: March 2026
Every month, the European Parliament plenary session takes place in Strasbourg. And every month, IR Media follows it closely. These are the highlights of the last plenary session taking place from 9th to 12nd March 2026: European Parliament against gender pay gap On Wednesday eurodeputies voted on the report prepared by the Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality. This report maps the gender pay gap in the European Union, its consequences and proposes solutions to combat it. Gender pay gap is a difference between the average gross hourly earnings of men and women. In the EU it’s currently 12 %. This doesn’t mean that jobs would give women automatically a 12% lower salary just because they are women… The gender pay gap is more of a structural problem. Stereotypes that there are “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs” still persist in society and influence our career choices. Those “women’s jobs”, are considered less prestigious, therefore less paid. If women try to get into “men’s jobs”, they face backlash and sexism not all of them can withstand. Moreover, women are still expected to perform the majority of housework and childcare. Tasks that are unpaid, and often force women to interrupt their careers. Which results in women having lower pensions. Some of the solutions this report proposes are: AI will have to respect copyright On Tuesday, MEPs adopted a series of recommendations to protect copyrighted creative work from use by artificial intelligence. Because right now, AI uses copyrighted works freely with no limits. Eurodeputies want authors to be paid if their works are used by AI, ideally even retrospectively. And, to guarantee them an option to completely opt-out from their work being used by AI. They also want to make AI companies transparent about what copyrighted works they used to train their models. Now it’s up for the European Commission to transform these recommendations into concrete laws. Chat Control reached a compromise On Wednesday, the European parliament voted to extend exemption from ePrivacy Directive. This directive normally prohibits the scanning of private messages, but the exception allows it. The goal was to enable big digital platforms to detect child sexual abuse materials by scaning their users’ messages. But it was a bit double-edged because it could be misused to spy on citizens by authoritarian governments. Fortunately, MPs also voted that scanning private messages can only take place under a court order in case of a suspected sexual abuse. Last but not least, do you remember how the last plenary session, the Special Committee on the Housing Crisis came up with recommendations to deal with the housing crisis in the EU? This session they presented it to the whole Parliament, and the parliament voted yes. The next sitting will be held from 27th to 30th April 2026 in Strasbourg