EU gender pay gap: what the 11.1% figure actually measures
October 27, 2026 · Frisian News
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Eurostat puts the EU gender pay gap at 11.1% for 2024, measured as the raw difference in average gross hourly earnings. The agency explicitly says the figure is broader than a discrimination measure, and the Commission acknowledges a large unexplained portion remains.
11.1 per cent. It is Eurostat's 2024 reading of the EU gender pay gap, and Eurostat is clear about what it is: the difference between the average gross hourly earnings of male and female employees, expressed as a percentage of male earnings.
Eurostat calls the figure the unadjusted gender pay gap. It covers enterprises employing ten or more workers, spanning industry, construction and services but not public administration. "Unadjusted" carries weight. The figure makes no correction for the occupations men and women hold, the hours they work, the sectors they are in or their years of experience. Eurostat states directly that the measure covers "a concept which is broader than discrimination in the sense of equal pay for work of equal value."
The agency identifies two sources of the gap. One is differences in the average characteristics of male and female employees, covering things like occupation, sector and working time. The other is differences in what the same characteristics return financially. The 11.1 per cent headline captures both together and isolates neither.
Country-level Eurostat data sharpen the picture. Luxembourg recorded a gap of minus 0.8 per cent in 2024, meaning women's average hourly pay ran marginally above men's. Estonia recorded 18.8 per cent. The spread between the two is 19.6 percentage points, across member states that all operate under the same EU equality law.
Eurostat data also show the gap is generally much lower for workers under 25 and widens with age, a pattern the agency links to career interruptions women experience more often than men. The private sector shows a higher gap than the public sector in almost every member state with available data; Eurostat attributes this partly to transparent wage grids in public employment that apply equally to men and women. In financial and insurance activities, Eurostat recorded a gap of 40.3 per cent in Hungary in 2024.
The European Commission's own equal pay page names the known contributors. Around 24 per cent of the gap, the Commission says, comes from the over-representation of women in lower-paying sectors such as care, health and education. Women carry more unpaid work hours per week than men, which affects career choices. Fewer than one in ten of top companies' CEOs are women. Then the Commission adds a line that ought to travel with every Equal Pay Day press release: "The far largest part of the gender pay gap remains unexplained in the EU and cannot be linked to worker or workplace characteristics such as education, occupation, working time or economic activity."
Unexplained is not the same as proven discrimination. The EU's Pay Transparency Directive, with a transposition deadline of 7 June 2026, reflects that distinction precisely. Its joint pay assessment is triggered not by the economy-wide 11.1 per cent but by a gap of 5 per cent or more within a category of workers doing the same work or work of equal value, which the employer cannot justify on objective, gender-neutral grounds. That is a like-for-like comparison. The unadjusted economy-wide figure is not.
A gap that has changed minimally over the past decade and widens with age is a real signal. The question is what it proves, and the agency that publishes the headline number has been consistent: a raw difference in average hourly pay is where the inquiry starts, not where it ends.
Published October 27, 2026 · Frisian News