Gender employment gap in the core working ages
- Eurostat dataset
- sdg_05_30
- Reference period
- 2025
- Unit of measure
- percentage points
Key estimates
- EU aggregate (2025): 9.60 percentage points.
- Highest value: Türkiye at 38.0 percentage points; lowest: Lithuania at -0.60 percentage points.
- Cross-country mean 9.52 percentage points, standard deviation 7.72, coefficient of variation 81.1% across 34 reporting countries.
- Aggregate change 2014→2025: -21.3% on a constant panel of 33 countries.
How far is Europe from gender parity in employment? Eurostat dataset sdg_05_30 reports gender employment gap in the core working ages for 34 reporting countries, with 2025 as the most recent period carrying broad coverage. The European aggregate stands at 9.60 percentage points. Expressed in percentage points, the employment gap is additive and directly comparable between countries.
The five highest values in 2025 are recorded by Türkiye (38.0), Bosnia and Herzegovina (28.3), Italy (19.1), North Macedonia (18.7), Romania (18.7), all expressed in percentage points. At the opposite end of the distribution sit Lithuania (-0.60), Estonia (0.50), Finland (1.30), Latvia (1.90), Sweden (3.90). while the median country reports 7.25 percentage points against a mean of 9.52 percentage points.
Dispersion is wide: the standard deviation across countries is 7.72 percentage points, giving a coefficient of variation of 81.1%. The mean sits above the median, which indicates that the distribution is pulled by the upper tail rather than being symmetric. Any European average quoted for this indicator therefore describes a synthetic country that few Member States resemble.
Between 2014 and 2025 the summed value across the 33 countries reporting in both periods moved by -21.3%. The largest relative increases are observed in Cyprus (+31.2%), Bulgaria (+27.6%), Norway (+25.0%); the largest decreases, or the smallest increases, in Lithuania (-124.0%), Estonia (-92.3%), Latvia (-57.8%). Because the panel is held constant, this change is not an artefact of countries entering or leaving the sample.
Lower values are the policy-preferred direction, so the top of the distribution identifies where the burden concentrates: bringing the highest observation down to the median would remove 30.8 percentage points from the European total for that country alone. The estimates above are reproducible: the dataset identifier, filter dimensions and reference period are stated in the methodological note, and the series can be re-downloaded from the Eurostat dissemination API at any time.
Methodological note
Source: Eurostat, dataset sdg_05_30 ('Gender employment gap, by type of employment'), extracted from the Eurostat dissemination API (JSON-stat 2.0) on the dataset update of 2026-06-11. Filter dimensions: wstatus=EMP; age=Y20-64; unit=PC_PNT. Unit of measure: percentage points. Reference period: 2025. Geographic perimeter: national reporting units with two-character geo codes (34 countries with a non-missing observation); European and euro-area aggregates are excluded from the cross-country statistics and reported separately. Descriptive statistics (mean, median, population standard deviation, coefficient of variation) are computed unweighted over reporting countries. Change over time is computed on a constant panel: only countries with a non-missing observation in both the base and the reference period enter the calculation, which removes composition effects but may differ from the officially published aggregate. No imputation, seasonal adjustment or re-scaling has been applied beyond what Eurostat performs at source. Flagged provisional and estimated observations are retained as published.
Source data
The underlying series can be inspected and re-downloaded from the Eurostat data browser.