Gender gaps in the SDG equality framework
- Eurostat dataset
- sdg_05_20
- Reference period
- 2024
- Unit of measure
- percentage points
Key estimates
- EU aggregate (2024): 11.1 percentage points.
- Highest value: Estonia at 18.8 percentage points; lowest: Luxembourg at -0.80 percentage points.
- Cross-country mean 10.8 percentage points, standard deviation 5.18, coefficient of variation 48.0% across 30 reporting countries.
- Aggregate change 2013→2024: -27.1% on a constant panel of 29 countries.
Which gender gaps are closing, and which are not? Eurostat dataset sdg_05_20 reports gender gaps in the SDG equality framework for 30 reporting countries, with 2024 as the most recent period carrying broad coverage. The European aggregate stands at 11.1 percentage points. The SDG gender module aggregates several gaps under one governance perimeter, enabling internal consistency checks.
The five highest values in 2024 are recorded by Estonia (18.8), Czechia (18.5), Austria (17.6), Hungary (16.9), Finland (16.3), all expressed in percentage points. At the opposite end of the distribution sit Luxembourg (-0.80), Belgium (0.70), Romania (3.70), Poland (4.00), Malta (4.90). while the median country reports 11.5 percentage points against a mean of 10.8 percentage points.
Dispersion is wide: the standard deviation across countries is 5.18 percentage points, giving a coefficient of variation of 48.0%. The mean sits below the median, which indicates that the distribution is pulled by the lower tail rather than being symmetric. Any European average quoted for this indicator therefore describes a synthetic country that few Member States resemble.
Between 2013 and 2024 the summed value across the 29 countries reporting in both periods moved by -27.1%. The largest relative increases are observed in Slovenia (+27.0%), Hungary (-8.2%), Switzerland (-9.1%); the largest decreases, or the smallest increases, in Luxembourg (-112.9%), Belgium (-90.7%), Spain (-59.0%). 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 7.30 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_20 ('Gender pay gap in unadjusted form'), extracted from the Eurostat dissemination API (JSON-stat 2.0) on the dataset update of 2026-02-26. Filter dimensions: no dimension filters applied. Unit of measure: percentage points. Reference period: 2024. Geographic perimeter: national reporting units with two-character geo codes (30 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.