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Women at work: A snapshot of EU’s gender employment gap

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As we look at the EU’s labour market, data show that while men’s employment rate stood at 80.8% in 2024, women’s employment rate was 70.8%, resulting in a gender employment gap of 10.0 percentage points (pp). Gender employment gap is defined as the difference between employment rates of men and women aged 20-64.

However, in terms of part-time employment, the share of female part-time workers in total employment was much higher (27.8%) than that of men (7.7%). The same trend was registered for temporary contracts (11.3% vs 8.9%) and situations of underemployment (3.6% vs 1.6%), where the share of women was higher than that of men. 

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Source datasets: lfsi_emp_a and lfsi_pt_a

Gender employment gap down in 22 EU countries in 10 years

In 2024, the highest gender employment gap was recorded in Italy, with 19.4 pp, followed by Greece (18.8 pp) and Romania (18.1 pp). On the other hand, the gap was almost negligible in Finland (0.7 pp) and relatively narrow in Lithuania (1.4 pp) and Estonia (1.7 pp).

Between 2014 and 2024, the EU’s gender employment gap fell by 1.1 pp. This trend was registered in 22 EU countries, with the highest decline observed in Malta (-13.2 pp). Other decreases ranged from -7.4 pp in Luxembourg and -4.9 pp in Czechia to -0.2 pp in France. 

In Greece, the gender employment gap remained unchanged between 2014 and 2024, at 18.8 pp, while it increased in Cyprus (+2.3 pp), Bulgaria (+1.4 pp), Romania (+0.6 pp) and Italy (+0.5 pp).

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Source dataset: sdg_05_30

This article is part of a series of articles published to mark International Women’s Day. Please check our first article dedicated to women in management. 

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Methodological notes

  • Employment rate is calculated by dividing the number of employed people aged 20–64 by the total population of the same age group.
  • Part-time employment, underemployment (people who, in spite of being employed, do not work full-time and lack a sufficient volume of work), and temporary contracts are calculated as percentage of total employment of people aged 20-64 years. 
  • Break in time series for all countries in 2021, due to the implementation of Regulation (EU) 2019/1700.

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