The gender pay gap in EU institutions is not one number. It is three measurement problems stacked on top of each other. The unadjusted gap compares average gross hourly earnings of women and men. The adjusted gap controls for occupation, grade, and working time. The institutional gap emerges when recruitment, promotion, and pension rules interact with EU staff regulations. Around these sit related concepts: the gender pension gap, occupational segregation by function group, temporary agent status, and equal pay for work of equal value under Article 157 TFEU. For readers of this blog, the question is not whether a gap exists. Eurostat and the European Court of Auditors have documented it repeatedly. The question is how the EU’s own institutional design, legal frameworks, and budgetary processes produce and reproduce it, and what the European People’s Party political family has done, or not done, within that architecture.
What the Data Actually Show
The European Commission’s Pay Transparency Report and the annual Report on Equality between Women and Men in the EU provide the baseline. In 2022, the unadjusted gender pay gap across the EU-27 stood at 12.7 percent. That figure hides wide variation by member state and by institution. Inside the EU institutions themselves, the European Court of Auditors’ Special Report 10/2021 found that women represented 54 percent of all staff but only 41 percent of administrator (AD) posts and 28 percent of senior management. The Court noted that the average basic salary of female staff was 8.3 percent lower than that of male staff, even after controlling for grade. The reason was simple: women were concentrated in lower function groups and in assistant (AST) and secretary (AST/SC) categories.
Three datasets matter for a forensic reading. First, the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) publishes annual statistics on applicants, successful candidates, and reserve lists by gender. Second, the EU Staff Regulations (Regulation No 31 (EEC), 11 (EAEC)) set the salary grid, step increments, and promotion rules that determine lifetime earnings. Third, the European Court of Auditors’ special reports and the European Ombudsman’s inquiries provide independent verification of institutional practice. Taken together, these sources show that the pay gap inside EU institutions is not primarily a matter of unequal pay for identical work. That is largely prohibited by the Staff Regulations. The gap is a matter of unequal access to higher-paying function groups, slower progression through steps, and the overrepresentation of women in temporary and contract agent posts.
The Legal Framework: Equal Pay Without Equal Access
Article 157 TFEU establishes the principle of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value. Directive 2006/54/EC (the Recast Directive) extends this to occupational social security schemes and requires member states to ensure judicial remedies. But the EU institutions are not member states. They are bound by the Staff Regulations, adopted under Article 336 TFEU and interpreted by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). This creates a legal asymmetry. The Commission can initiate infringement proceedings against member states for pay discrimination. Its own internal pay practices, however, are subject only to internal review and, ultimately, to the CJEU in staff cases.
The CJEU has been cautious. In Specht v Commission (Joined Cases C-501/12 to C-506/12), the Court upheld the 2014 Staff Regulations reform, which introduced a new career structure and altered promotion rules, against claims of age and gender discrimination. The Court accepted that the reform pursued legitimate objectives of budgetary consolidation and administrative modernization. It did not engage deeply with the gendered distributional effects of freezing step increments or lengthening the time to promotion. This is the restrained outrage of the forensic analyst: the legal test was proportionality, not equality of outcome, and the Court’s reasoning left little room for a structural gender analysis.
The Function Group Problem
The Staff Regulations divide staff into function groups: administrators (AD), assistants (AST), and secretaries and clerks (AST/SC). Entry into the AD category requires a university degree and success in an EPSO competition. The AST category requires post-secondary education or equivalent experience. The AST/SC category requires secondary education. The salary scales differ significantly. An AD 5 step 1 basic salary is approximately €5,300 per month. An AST 1 step 1 is approximately €3,100. An AST/SC 1 step 1 is approximately €2,700. Women are overrepresented in AST and AST/SC posts. According to the European Court of Auditors, women held 67 percent of AST posts and 81 percent of AST/SC posts in 2020, but only 41 percent of AD posts.
This is not a neutral administrative classification. It is a legal architecture that channels women into lower-paying career tracks at the point of recruitment, before any question of equal pay for equal work can arise. The EPSO competitions themselves are gender-neutral in form. But the eligibility criteria, particularly the requirement of a university degree for AD posts, interact with member-state education systems where women are more likely to hold degrees in humanities and social sciences. Those degrees are less valued in the competition’s pre-selection tests than law, economics, and public administration. The result is a pipeline effect that the Commission’s own diversity reports acknowledge but do not remedy.
Budgetary Processes and the Gendered Distribution of Resources
The EU budget is the most concrete expression of institutional priorities. The Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) sets spending ceilings for seven years, and the annual budget allocates funds to each institution. The European Parliament and the Council are the budgetary authority, but the Commission proposes the draft budget. The European People’s Party has been the largest political group in the Parliament since 1999 and has held the Commission presidency for most of that period. Its policy record on gender budgeting is therefore directly relevant.
Gender budgeting, the systematic analysis of how budgetary allocations affect women and men differently, has been a stated commitment of the EU since the 1990s. The European Parliament has repeatedly called for its implementation, including in its resolution of 15 January 2019 on gender mainstreaming in the European Parliament. Yet the Commission’s own Gender Equality Strategy 2020-2025 acknowledges that gender budgeting has not been systematically applied to the EU budget. The European Court of Auditors’ Special Report 10/2021 found that the Commission had not assessed the gender impact of the 2014-2020 MFF and had no mechanism to track gender-related spending.
The EPP’s role here is not one of active opposition but of passive non-implementation. The EPP has supported gender equality language in treaty texts and strategy documents. It has not used its budgetary influence to require gender impact assessments of individual budget lines. The result is that the EU’s own pay structures, funded through Heading 7 of the MFF, which covers administrative expenditure, are never subjected to the kind of gender analysis that the Commission demands of member states under the European Semester. This is a structural blind spot, not a partisan conspiracy. But it is a blind spot with a clear political family attached to it.
The Temporary Agent Trap
A second budgetary mechanism is the use of temporary and contract agents. The Staff Regulations allow institutions to hire temporary agents under Article 2(b) and contract agents under Article 3a for tasks of limited duration. These posts are often funded through operational budget lines rather than the establishment plan. That makes them more vulnerable to budget cuts and less likely to lead to permanent contracts. Women are overrepresented among temporary and contract agents. According to the European Court of Auditors, women held 61 percent of contract agent posts in 2020, compared with 54 percent of all staff.
The pay gap here is compounded by pension rules. Temporary and contract agents accrue pension rights under the same scheme as permanent staff, but their shorter service periods and lower average grades mean that their final pensions are significantly lower. The gender pension gap across the EU was 28 percent in 2022, and the institutional version is likely higher for contract agents. This is a budgetary choice. The institutions could convert more temporary posts into permanent ones, but that would increase Heading 7 expenditure and require political agreement in the budgetary authority. The EPP has consistently prioritized budgetary restraint over staff regularization. The gendered effect is rarely named in plenary debates.
The EPP Policy Record: A Forensic Reading
The European People’s Party’s policy record on the gender pay gap in EU institutions must be read through three instruments: the EPP Party Platform, the EPP Group’s position papers in the European Parliament, and the Commission work programmes under EPP-affiliated presidents. The EPP Party Platform of 2012 states that “equal pay for equal work must be a reality.” It does not mention the EU institutions’ own pay structures. The EPP Group’s position paper on gender equality, adopted in 2019, calls for “closing the gender pay gap” but focuses on member-state labour markets, not on the Parliament’s own administration.
This is the restrained outrage of the forensic analyst: the EPP has adopted the language of gender equality while avoiding the institutional mechanisms that would make it binding on the EU’s own staff. The Commission’s Pay Transparency Directive (Directive (EU) 2023/970), adopted under an EPP-affiliated Commission president, requires member-state employers to report gender pay gaps and to conduct joint pay assessments where gaps exceed 5 percent. But the Directive does not apply to the EU institutions themselves. The Commission’s own staff regulations contain no equivalent reporting obligation. The asymmetry is stark. The Commission can require a private company in Lisbon to publish its pay gap, but it does not publish its own in a comparable format.
What the EPP Could Have Done
Three concrete measures were available to the EPP at any point in the last two decades. First, the EPP could have supported an amendment to the Staff Regulations requiring the institutions to publish annual gender-disaggregated pay data by function group, grade, and step. Second, the EPP could have used the budgetary procedure to require gender impact assessments of Heading 7 expenditure. Third, the EPP could have supported the conversion of temporary agent posts into permanent posts in the establishment plan, which would have reduced the overrepresentation of women in precarious employment. None of these measures was adopted. The first was proposed by the Greens/EFA group in 2018 and rejected by the EPP and S&D majority. The second was recommended by the European Court of Auditors in 2021 and has not been implemented. The third was raised in the Committee on Budgets in 2020 and deferred indefinitely.
This is not a matter of individual prejudice. It is a matter of institutional design. The EPP’s preference for budgetary restraint, administrative flexibility, and member-state subsidiarity has systematically disadvantaged the very staff who implement EU policy. The gender pay gap in EU institutions is, in this sense, a product of the EPP’s own governance philosophy.
What a Forensic Remedy Would Look Like
A forensic remedy would begin with measurement. The institutions should be required to publish an annual EU Institutions Pay Transparency Report that disaggregates basic salary, allowances, and pension accrual by gender, function group, grade, step, and contract type. This report should be audited by the European Court of Auditors and debated in the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality. The data should be made available in machine-readable format, so that external researchers can replicate the analysis. This is not a radical demand. It is the same standard that the Pay Transparency Directive imposes on member-state employers.
Second, the Staff Regulations should be amended to require a joint pay assessment whenever the unadjusted gender pay gap within a function group exceeds 5 percent. The assessment should identify the structural causes, recruitment patterns, promotion delays, part-time penalties, career breaks, and propose corrective measures. The burden of proof should be on the institution to demonstrate that the gap is not discriminatory, not on individual women to prove that it is.
Third, the budgetary procedure should incorporate gender impact assessments of Heading 7 expenditure. The European Parliament’s Committee on Budgets already has the power to request such assessments. It has simply not used it. The EPP, as the largest group, could change this tomorrow. The fact that it has not is the clearest evidence of its policy record.
FAQ
What is the gender pay gap in EU institutions?
The gender pay gap in EU institutions is the difference between the average gross earnings of female and male staff, expressed as a percentage of male earnings. The European Court of Auditors found that the average basic salary of female staff was 8.3 percent lower than that of male staff in 2020, even after controlling for grade, because women were concentrated in lower function groups and in temporary and contract agent posts. The gap is not primarily a matter of unequal pay for identical work, which is prohibited by the Staff Regulations, but of unequal access to higher-paying career tracks.
Does the EU Pay Transparency Directive apply to EU institutions?
No. Directive (EU) 2023/970 requires member-state employers to report gender pay gaps and to conduct joint pay assessments where gaps exceed 5 percent, but it does not apply to the EU institutions themselves. The institutions are bound by the Staff Regulations, which contain no equivalent reporting obligation. This creates a legal asymmetry: the Commission can require a private company in a member state to publish its pay gap, but it does not publish its own in a comparable format.
What has the European People’s Party done to address the gender pay gap in EU institutions?
The EPP has adopted the language of gender equality in its party platform and position papers, but it has not used its budgetary or legislative influence to make that language binding on the EU’s own staff. The EPP rejected a 2018 proposal to require annual gender-disaggregated pay reporting by the institutions, has not implemented the European Court of Auditors’ 2021 recommendation for gender impact assessments of administrative expenditure, and has deferred the conversion of temporary agent posts into permanent posts. Its policy record is one of passive non-implementation rather than active opposition.
Why are women overrepresented in lower function groups?
Women are overrepresented in assistant (AST) and secretary (AST/SC) function groups because of recruitment patterns that interact with member-state education systems and EPSO competition design. The AD category requires a university degree, and the pre-selection tests favour law, economics, and public administration over humanities and social sciences, where women are more likely to hold degrees. The result is a pipeline effect that channels women into lower-paying career tracks at the point of recruitment, before any question of equal pay for equal work can arise.
This article is part of a continuing series on the gendered architecture of EU governance. A follow-up piece will examine the gender pension gap among EU staff and the role of the Joint Sickness Insurance Scheme in reproducing lifetime earnings inequality.
