BRUSSELS (CN) - Women in Europe have never been closer to earning what men do - at least on paper.
New data from Eurostat shows the gender pay gap across the EU fell to 11.1% in 2024 - the lowest on record. Women earned about 89 cents for every euro men made per hour, up from roughly 84 cents a decade ago.
The decline has been steady: from 16.4% in 2012 to 13.0% in 2020 to 11.1% now. But the picture varies wildly. Luxembourg is the only EU country where men earned less than women on average. Estonia had the widest gap at 18.8%. Belgium, Romania and Poland all came in below 5%.
The hourly figure, though, is "a very limited measure," said Jolanta Reingard of the European Institute for Gender Equality. Countries like Malta and Italy have low pay gaps but some of the EU's lowest female employment rates. "The ones who are in the labor market usually take quite qualified jobs," she said. "But the employment rate of women is so low that it does not really show us a good sign of gender equality."
The real picture requires three numbers, Reingard said: the hourly pay gap (11.1%), the annual earnings gap (23%) and the pension gap (25%). Even Luxembourg - despite its negative hourly gap - has a 14% annual earnings gap and the EU's third-largest pension gap. "It's still kind of far from equality," she said.
The headline numbers mask other fractures too. Belgium's near-zero gap hides a 16.1% disparity in part-time work. Latvia's full-time gap hit nearly 20%. And across the EU, the gap barely exists for workers under 25 but balloons with age - peaking in the 50s and 60s, when career breaks and missed promotions compound.
A February study by the German Institute for Economic Research found that being confident and assertive pays off nearly twice as much for men as for women - while being cooperative and agreeable drags down men's wages more than women's. In other words, the stereotypes aren't just cultural baggage - they're baked into the paycheck.
According to a February report by the European Trade Union Institute, closing the employment gap has often meant "employing [women] in low-paying, poor quality jobs" - with the result being a "stereotypical sorting into men's and women's jobs," not genuine equality.
Estimates put full gender equality at least 50 years away. Reingard called even that "very, very optimistic." "We probably need to double it, if not triple," she told Courthouse News.
A widening policy gulf
Europe's record low arrives just as the United States is going backward. Census Bureau data from September showed American women working full-time earned 81 cents on the dollar in 2024, down from 84 cents two years earlier - the first back-to-back widening in more than 60 years. Black women earned 65 cents and Latina women 58 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.
Financial services is the worst-performing sector on both sides of the Atlantic - gaps above 20% across most of the EU, hitting 40.3% in Hungary, mirroring U.S. data showing finance as America's widest-gap industry.
And on neither side do women regularly sue. Reingard said pay cases at the European Court of Justice are "such a rare thing" - workers simply don't have the data to prove discrimination. In the U.S., same story: More than 88,000 discrimination charges landed at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in fiscal year 2024, but Equal Pay Act claims usually number fewer than 1,500 a year, according to EEOC enforcement data.
The EU directive was built to change that. A woman in Madrid or Munich will be able to demand to know what her male colleagues earn. If her employer can't justify a gap above 5%, the company has to fix it. Salary ranges in job ads. No more asking candidates what they earned before. And if it goes to court, the burden of proof lands on the employer - not the worker.
Reingard called it a cultural shift more than a regulation. "We need to break the stigma and taboo around pay," she said. "People don't talk about it. It's such taboo information that basically keeps people unaware."
Implementation has been messy. Only a handful of EU countries have finalized their laws. The Netherlands may miss the deadline. Denmark hasn't started. But Brussels expects compliance from all 27 EU members by June, with first pay gap reports due in 2027.
The U.S. is heading the other way. The Trump administration has gutted federal DEI programs and pursued workforce cuts that researchers say disproportionately hit women. More than 400,000 mothers left the workforce in the first half of 2025 - the steepest drop in over 40 years. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which has been introduced in every Congress since 1997, remains in legislative limbo.
Europe's 2024 numbers are now the baseline. In the U.S., the question is whether flat wages, disappearing flexibility and inadequate child care reverse on their own.
Courthouse News correspondent Yuval Molina is based in Brussels, Belgium.
Source: Courthouse News Service
