Gender pay gap: There is only one country in Europe that pays women more than men

The gender pay gap is still very much evident in Europe. Several indicators exhibit the inequality between women and men in many arenas, but economic life is one of the key areas affecting women the most.

Despite some improvements in Europe, women still suffer from gender gaps when it comes to wages, labour force participation, employment and hierarchical positions in the workplace.

Euronews Next crunches the data in these main indicators to give a fuller picture of the current gender divide.

Gender inequality in wages has increasingly been debated in recent years.

Unadjusted gender pay gap is a significant indicator, showing the difference between the average gross hourly earnings of men and women, expressed as a percentage of the average gross hourly earnings of men.

It does not take into account education, age, hours worked or type of job.

This basically reveals how much less women earn than men. In 2022, the gender gap was 12.7 per cent in the EU. In other words, women earned 12.7 per cent on average less per hour than men.

This shows that women on average earn €87.3 for every €100 earned by men. In short, women would need to work an extra 1.5 months to make up the difference.

The gender pay gap considerably varied in the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) bloc. In 2022, it was over 17 per cent in several countries.

Estonia had the highest gender pay gap at 21.3 per cent, followed by Austria (18.4 per cent), Switzerland and Czechia (both 17.9 per cent).

Luxembourg (-0.7 per cent) was the only country with a negative figure, meaning women earned slightly more than men.

Apart from Luxembourg, Italy, Romania and Belgium had the lowest gender pay gap at less than five per cent.

Among the EU’s "Big Four," Germany (17.7