The gap in employment rates between men and women in the EU is by far the widest in Malta, even though it has narrowed, an EU survey has confirmed.

The member states with the smallest employment gender gaps in 2007 were Finland (3.6 percentage points), Sweden (4.7 pp) and Lithuania (5.7 pp), and those with the largest were Malta (37.3 pp), Greece (27.0 pp), Italy (24.1 pp) and Spain (21.5 pp).

Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, said that in 2007 in the EU27, the employment rate was 72.5% for men and 58.3 for women, compared with 70.7% and 53.6% respectively in 2000. This means that employment rates for both men and women have increased over this period, and that the difference in rates between men and women has narrowed from 17.1 percentage points in 2000 to 14.2 pp in 2007.

The evolution of the gender gap was not uniform; the gap decreased in 19 member states between 2000 and 2007 and increased in the remaining eight. The largest decreases in the gap between men and women were found in Luxembourg (25.0 pp in 2000 compared with 16.2 pp in 2007), Spain (29.8 pp compared with 21.5 pp) and Cyprus (25.6 pp compared with 17.6 pp). The gap increased most in Slovakia (10.5 pp in 2000 compared with 15.4 pp in 2007) and Lithuania (2.9 pp compared with 5.7 pp).

The gender gap in Malta narrowed from 41.9pp in 2000 to 37.3 pp last year.

Part-time work

In the case of part-time employment, both in 2007 and in 2000 the share of part-time employment was higher for women than for men in all member states. From 2000 to 2007 this gap increased slightly from 22.8 pp to 23.8 pp in the EU27. The gap rose in 17 member states and fell in nine.

The highest increase was observed in Malta, where the difference between the shares of women and men in part-time employment rose from 10.4 pp in 2000 to 20.9 pp in 2007, followed by Luxembourg (24.1 pp to 34.5 pp) and Italy (13.6 pp to 22.2 pp). The largest decreases were registered in the United Kingdom (35.9 pp to 32.2 pp) and Romania (3.8 pp to 0.6 pp).