The European Union has been recognized as a leading actor in women’s empowerment and gender equality policy. Several recent studies underline the interaction of backlash against gender equality with Euroscepticism, more often expressed by men. This leads to the question whether the EU policy-makers see men as potential beneficiaries of European policies.

With the conceptual lens of policy target populations (Schneider and Ingram 1993), this study analyses quantitatively and qualitatively two data sources: the full dataset of 45 thousand press releases of the European Commission since 1985 and all gender equality strategies of the EU since 1982.

We show that since the 1990s, and particularly since 2008, gender has been successfully mainstreamed in Commission’s communication, appearing in up to 13% of press releases in 2018. This progress has helped in establishing the image of women as a “deserving and politically powerless group” and allowed to broaden the spectrum of policies aiming at supporting women. However, it has also introduced the negative portrayal of men as a “non-deserving and politically powerful group.”

The negative image of men excludes the possibility of creating policies targeted at men, unless their goal would be to help women. Our analysis of gender equality strategies shows how men’s problems are known and mentioned by the Commission but not treated as worthy of targeted policies, even if the inequalities arise in unequal access to and use of EU programmes like Erasmus+.

The paper may also fit tracks: "Gender Politics and Diversity", "European Politics", "Political Communication."