• Gender-responsive Public Procurement: uncommon practice in the EU

    Gender-responsive Public Procurement (GRPP) is procurement that promotes gender equality through the goods, services or works being purchased. GRPP can be a driver towards promoting equal employment opportunities and social inclusion for women and men, providing equal opportunities for women and men at all stages of the supply chain and addressing gender pay gap inequalities in the labour market. EIGE...

  • Women at the forefront of decision-making in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic

    Monitoring progress in gender equality is key to support better informed policy-making and ensure its effectiveness and accountability. The European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) monitors the distribution of power in the European Union (EU) through regular collection of data on women and men in key decision-making positions. The COVID-19 pandemic presented an unprecedented global threat requiring prompt and considered...

  • Transport in the EU: Too few women in decision-making

    Despite efforts to improve gender equality, EU labour markets are still characterised by persistent horizontal segregation, whereby workers in particular sectors are predominantly women or men. According to 2020 data, only four in ten workers in the EU are employed in a gender-balanced sector, where the workforce comprises at least 40 % of each gender. Transport is a prime example...

  • Decision-making in environment and climate change: women woefully under-represented in the EU Member States

    Environment and climate change is a hot topic across the globe and it is crucial that related policy decisions serve women and men equally. To make that happen, women need to be adequately represented in decision-making processes. EIGE regularly monitors the share of women in positions of power in the environment and climate change arena within the EU. The time-series...

  • Women and power in the Western Balkans and Turkey

    The share of women in decision-making positions is one important element in assessing the level of gender equality. That’s why the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) measures how much power women hold in politics, economics and finance, research, sports and the media. Below you can find our assessment of the situation in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo [1], Montenegro...

    Five women colleagues at a work meeting smiling to camera
  • The EU is inching towards comparable data on intimate partner violence

    Spikes in domestic violence reports during Covid-19 lockdowns have been a sad reminder that, across the world, women frequently face the most danger from people they know. Yet when it comes to intimate partner violence, each EU Member State collects data in a different way.

    Woman forensic analyst
  • What lies behind the gender pay gap?

    The gender pay gap in the EU stands at 16 % and has barely changed in the last decade. In most EU countries, the gender pay gap is slowly reducing but in Malta, Portugal and Slovenia, the gap has increased by more than 3.0 % since 2007. There are big differences across the EU, with the gender pay gap ranging...

  • How many women have top positions in the EU candidate countries and potential candidates?

    EIGE’s Gender Statistics Database has expanded beyond the current EU Member States. We can now monitor how gender-balance in decision-making is developing also in the Western Balkan countries and Turkey, which are part of the EU programme called the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA). EIGE supports the IPA beneficiaries in their efforts to monitor and foster gender equality in the...

    women in IPA
  • Legislative quotas can be strong drivers for gender balance in boardrooms

    Over the last nine years, the proportion of women on the boards of the largest listed companies across the EU has more than doubled: from 12 % in October 2010, to 28 % in April 2019. The countries that introduced legislative quotas were driving the progress, but soft measures have also worked in some countries. However, gender balance has not...

    gender balance
  • Achieving gender-balance in national parliaments would take another 12 years

    The share of women in single/lower houses of national parliaments in the EU has increased in the last 10 years from 24 % to 31 % in 2018, yet the rate of change is slow. Without further action, it would take another 12 years to achieve gender-balance (at least 40 % of either women or men) in national parliaments across...

    women in parliaments