Gender Equality Index 2021: Health

With an overall EU score of 62.7 points, the domain of knowledge^[1] has seen almost no change since the 2020 Index. The score improved by only 2.9 points overall between 2010 and 2019 (Figure 10), with the subdomain of attainment and participation driving that progress.

Figure 10. Scores for the domain of knowledge and its subdomains (2019), and changes over time

Although this subdomain’s score increased by 6.5 points from 2010 to 2019, there was little change between 2018 and 2019. Gender segregation in education remains a major block to gender equality in the EU. Not only has there been no progress since 2010, but the score for this subdomain actually fell by 0.4 points in 2019.

In 2019, the four top-performing countries in the domain of knowledge were Sweden, Belgium, Denmark and Luxembourg, all with scores higher than 70 points. At the opposite end of the spectrum were Greece, Germany, Romania, Croatia and Latvia, all with scores lower than 55 points. Most Member States saw little to no change in their domain score between 2018 and 2019. France, Slovakia and Latvia were the exceptions, with decreases of 2.9 points and 1.9 points and an increase of 1.6 points, respectively (Figure 11).

The majority of Member States did, however, register a modest rise in their overall knowledge domain score from 2010 to 2019. The greatest progress was made in Lithuania (+ 6.4 points), Poland (+ 5.7 points) and Romania (+ 5.6 points). The most regress was in Belgium (– 2.2 points) and Germany (– 1.6 points).

Figure 11. Scores for the domain of knowledge (2019), and changes since 2010 and 2018, by EU Member State