{"id":312957,"date":"2026-03-04T18:44:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T18:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/312957\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T18:44:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T18:44:11","slug":"gender-equality-is-improving-in-the-eu-but-the-pension-gap-persists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/312957\/","title":{"rendered":"Gender equality is improving in the EU, but the pension gap persists"},"content":{"rendered":"

By&nbspJames Thomas<\/a>&nbsp&&nbspvideo by Maud Zaba<\/p>\n

\n Published on 04\/03\/2026 – 10:30 GMT+1\u2022Updated
\n 12:35\n <\/p>\n

Despite significant progress in women\u2019s representation in leadership roles and a narrowing gender pay gap, full gender equality in the EU is said to still be at least 50 years away, according to the European Institute for Gender Inequality Index.<\/p>\n

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One area that still needs improvement is pensions: new figures from Eurostat show that the average pension for women aged 65 or above in the EU was 24.5% lower than that for men in 2024.<\/p>\n

When broken down by country, Malta had the largest pension gender gap, with women receiving around 40% less than men on average. It was followed by the Netherlands (36.3%) and Austria (35.6%).<\/p>\n

On the flip side, the smallest gaps were seen in Estonia (5.6%), Slovakia (8.4%), the Czech Republic and Hungary (both 9.6%).<\/p>\n

These rates are significantly better than the other end of the table, but the overall trend across the EU shows that there’s still much progress to be made.<\/p>\n

A similar trend emerges even when looking at median pensions: here, women in the EU received 24.9% less than men.<\/p>\n

Luxembourg had the highest gap (43.3%), then Spain (41.1%) and the Netherlands (39.6%).<\/p>\n

Down at the other end, Estonia actually registered a -0.3% gap, showing that women’s median pension was actually a little bit higher than men\u2019s. It\u2019s followed by Hungary (0.4%) and Denmark (2.7%) with near parity.<\/p>\n

Women at a higher risk of poverty than men<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, women aged 65 or older faced a higher risk of poverty than men in 22 EU countries, according to Eurostat.<\/p>\n

The agency found that at the EU level in 2024, the difference in the at-risk-of-poverty (AROP) rate between men and women aged 65 years or over was -5.6%, showing that women were at a greater disadvantage.<\/p>\n

This was especially true in Malta (-18.6%), Lithuania (-13.3%), Austria (-13%) and Portugal (-12.5%).<\/p>\n

Only five countries showed the opposite trend, where men faced a greater risk than women: Luxembourg (1.9%), Sweden (1.3%), Denmark (0.7%), Belgium (0.48%) and Slovenia (0.39%).<\/p>\n

Gender differences in how at-risk-of-poverty people are were wider among people aged 65 or older than those under 65, Eurostat said. However, this wasn’t true of all countries.<\/p>\n

At the EU level, the gender difference in the AROP rate was -1.9% for women under 65 years and -5.6% for those aged 65 years or over.<\/p>\n

The difference was particularly noticeable in Portugal (8.4% for women younger than 65 years and -12.5% for women aged 65 years or over, resulting in a -20.9% difference), Lithuania (a -20.0% difference), Ireland (-18.7%) and Bulgaria (-17.2%).<\/p>\n

While older women generally faced a higher risk of poverty (in relation to men of the same age) than younger women, in some countries, the opposite was true.<\/p>\n

Luxembourg registered a 9.2% difference, followed by Slovenia (4.1%), Denmark (2.5%), Germany (1.3%) and France (0.7%) \u2014 these positive differences indicate that younger women faced a greater relative disadvantage compared to men than older women did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By&nbspJames Thomas&nbsp&&nbspvideo by Maud Zaba Published on 04\/03\/2026 – 10:30 GMT+1\u2022Updated 12:35 Despite significant progress in women\u2019s representation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312958,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[138,2487,246,31191,56627,111,139,69,12613,244,245],"class_list":{"0":"post-312957","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-european-union","10":"tag-finance","11":"tag-gender-equality","12":"tag-gender-pay-gap","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-pensions","17":"tag-personal-finance","18":"tag-personalfinance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}