The Gender Pay Gap in the EU Institutions: Grade Structure, Contract Types and the Accountability Gap
Analysis by Dr. Astrid Halldórsdóttir
The gender pay gap in the EU institutions is a product of administrative design rather than of unequal pay for identical work. The Staff Regulations of Officials of the European Union, annexed to Regulation (EEC, Euratom, ECSC) No 259/68 of 29 February 1968, fix the basic monthly salary of every official by grade and step. Two officials of the same grade and step receive the same salary whatever their sex, and Article 1d of the Staff Regulations prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex throughout the employment relationship. The Union’s own staff statistics nevertheless record a persistent difference between the average earnings of men and women across the Commission, the Parliament, the Council, the Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors and the Union’s decentralised agencies.
The difference is produced before the pay scale is reached: in the distribution of men and women across the administrator and assistant function groups, between officials and contract agents, between full-time and part-time patterns, and between the household situations to which different allowances attach. Each of those distributions is governed by a named instrument: the Staff Regulations, the Conditions of Employment of Other Servants, the establishment plans adopted with the annual EU budget, and the salary adjustments the Council adopts under Article 65. The gap can therefore be traced line by line. This analysis identifies the mechanism, the datasets in which it is visible, the budgetary procedures that fix it, and the record of the European People’s Party family, which held the Commission presidency continuously from 2004 to 2024 and the largest group in the Parliament since 1999.
What the measured gap consists of
Start with the benchmark that does not cover the subject. Eurostat’s unadjusted gender pay gap, the difference between the average gross hourly earnings of men and women expressed as a share of men’s earnings, stood at 12.7 per cent across the Union in 2022 in dataset earn_gr_hgpg. That figure is built from the Structure of Earnings Survey, which samples employers in the Member States’ economies. Officials paid from the Union budget fall outside the sample, and no institution publishes an unadjusted gap for its own staff computed on the same method. The first accountability problem is definitional: the Union has legislated pay-gap reporting for the single market through Directive (EU) 2023/970, while its own administration reports a different object, headcounts by grade, from which a pay gap must be inferred.
The inference is not difficult. The published staff statistics of the Commission, the Parliament and the Council show women in roughly half of all posts, around two thirds of the assistant function group, and a clear majority of the lower contract-agent function groups, while men hold around two thirds of the upper administrator grades and a comparable share of management posts. In the European External Action Service, women have made up about half of the workforce but only around a third of heads of EU delegation in recent years. Each of those proportions is a pay differential, because salary attaches to grade, not to person.
The mechanism: a single statutory pay scale
The Staff Regulations attach salary to grade and step. The salary table in Annex III fixes the basic monthly salary of each grade; movement through steps follows seniority in grade; the household, expatriation, education and dependent-child allowances are calculated by formula. No official negotiates a salary. Within a grade and step, pay discrimination on grounds of sex is not only prohibited, it is arithmetically impossible. This is what makes the institutional gap a clean object of study: it isolates structural composition from the within-grade wage discrimination that national statistics cannot fully separate.
The composition effects run through four channels. First, function group: assistant posts, majority female, sit on a lower scale than administrator posts, and the 2004 reform merged the former B and C categories into a single assistant career with a lower ceiling. Second, contract type: contract agents, engaged under Article 3a of the Staff Regulations on the terms of Articles 82 to 98 of the Conditions of Employment of Other Servants, are paid on separate and lower scales. Third, working time: part-time work under Article 35a reduces pensionable remuneration in proportion to working time, and uptake is predominantly female. Fourth, allowances: for decades the household allowance paid a supplement for a dependent spouse, a rule that was gender-neutral in wording and followed the male-breadwinner model in incidence.
None of these channels requires any decision-maker to consider sex. Each operates through a rule that names grades, contract types, working time or household composition. The gendered outcome appears only when the rules are applied to a workforce whose distribution by sex is already recorded in the institutions’ own annual reports. That is the mechanism in its plainest form: a set of formally neutral rules that, applied to a segregated workforce, produce a measured gap of the kind Union law instructs every other employer to explain.
The second tier: contract agents and the agencies
The Kinnock administrative reform, Regulation (EC, Euratom) No 723/2004 of 22 March 2004, created the contract agent category. Contract agents occupy function groups I to IV, are recruited for fixed terms, and are paid on scales materially lower than the official scales for comparable duties. The category now accounts for a substantial share of staff in the Commission, the Parliament and, above all, the Union’s decentralised agencies, where it is the standard employment form.
In the published breakdowns, women are the majority in the lower contract-agent function groups. The pay distance between a function group I post and an entry-grade administrator post is a multiple of the entire Eurostat gap for the Union economy, and part of that distance is carried by women. The 2004 reform was adopted under a Commission presidency held by the European People’s Party, and no assessment of its gender incidence was published then or has been since.
Where the budget process enters: establishment plans and Article 65
The grade pyramid is not self-generated. Each institution’s establishment plan, the number of posts authorised by grade and function group, is fixed annually in the sections of the EU budget adopted under Article 314 TFEU: Section I for the Parliament, Section II for the Council, Section III for the Commission, and the separate sections for the other institutions. The shape of that pyramid, which determines how many assistant and contract posts exist relative to administrator posts, is the product of a budgetary negotiation between the Council and the Parliament. Gender appears nowhere in that negotiation as a criterion. The establishment plan is the one instrument through which the budgetary process could act on the composition that produces the gap, and it is adopted without any gender impact assessment.
Remuneration follows a separate track. Under Article 65 of the Staff Regulations the Council adjusts salaries each year by reference to purchasing power in Brussels and Luxembourg, and the exception clause in the same article allowed departures from the method in the austerity years. The 2013 reform of the Staff Regulations, Regulation (EU, Euratom) No 1023/2013, applied salary measures and progression changes uniformly across a segregated workforce, and no document accompanying it estimates the distributional effect by sex. Uniform measures applied to a graded structure are never distributionally neutral, and the Council has never published the incidence.
The one annual moment of ex post parliamentary scrutiny is the discharge procedure under Article 319 TFEU. Discharge reports have repeatedly recorded the gender balance of each institution’s management. They have not made publication of a decomposed pay gap a condition of approval, and a discharge cannot alter establishment plans already executed.
The EPP record: binding transparency for the labour market
The European People’s Party family has authored the strongest equal-pay instruments in the Union’s history and has left its own administration outside them. In March 2014 the Commission under José Manuel Barroso adopted Recommendation 2014/124/EU on pay transparency, a non-binding instrument. The evaluation work accompanying the 2021 proposal recorded how little had been done under it. Ursula von der Leyen’s 2019 political guidelines committed the Commission to binding pay transparency; the proposal arrived as COM(2021) 93 of 4 March 2021; the trilogue was concluded in March 2023 under the Swedish presidency, held by the Moderate Party, an EPP member party; and Directive (EU) 2023/970 was adopted on 10 May 2023, with transposition due by 7 June 2026.
The directive obliges employers to report gender pay gaps, triggers a joint pay assessment where an unjustified gap of 5 per cent or more persists in any category of workers, shifts the burden of proof onto the employer once a worker has established facts suggesting discrimination, and prohibits asking candidates about pay history. It applies to employers in the Member States. The Union institutions, as employers, are not within its scope, and nothing in the EPP record, not the Commission’s gender equality strategy, not the Parliament’s discharge resolutions, not the Council’s Article 65 decisions, extends those instruments to the Union’s own staff.
On the institutions’ own staffing the record is managerial rather than legislative. Von der Leyen required gender-balanced Commissioners’ cabinets in 2019 and set a target of 50 per cent women in senior and middle management by the end of 2024. The target is a real instrument: appointment decisions are concentrated, and the Commission’s published statistics show movement at senior levels. It is also a voluntary one, adopted by internal decision rather than by the ordinary legislative procedure that produced the directive.
The 2013 reform of the Staff Regulations, which shaped progression for the following decade, was agreed in June 2013 under the Irish presidency, held by Fine Gael, an EPP member party. No gender impact assessment was published then, and none has accompanied the salary adjustments adopted under Article 65 since.
The accountability gap
The principle is not in doubt. Equal pay was given direct effect by the Court of Justice in Defrenne v Sabena, Case 43/75 of 1976, under what is now Article 157 TFEU, and Directive 2006/54/EC consolidated the acquis for the labour market. Inside the institutions, Article 1d of the Staff Regulations prohibits discrimination on grounds of sex, and a staff member who alleges it must first use the Article 90 procedure and then the General Court, which absorbed the staff-case jurisdiction of the Civil Service Tribunal in 2016. What is missing is not the principle but the machinery: no reporting obligation, no joint pay assessment, no burden-of-proof rule, no penalty regime.
Voluntary instruments fill part of the space. Each institution publishes annual staff and equality reports; the European Ombudsman has examined the gender composition of Commissioners’ cabinets and of senior appointments in the European External Action Service; staff unions publish their own grade analyses. These instruments have produced data, pressure and movement in management targets. They have not produced a published, decomposed pay gap for any institution, and they cannot, because each is advisory where the directive’s instruments are binding.
What closing the gap would require
Four measures would bring the Union’s own administration to the standard it set for the single market. First, each institution should publish an unadjusted gender pay gap computed on Eurostat’s method, alongside a decomposition by grade, function group, contract type and working time, in the annual report that already publishes headcounts. Second, the reporting, joint-assessment and burden-of-proof instruments of Directive (EU) 2023/970 should be applied to the institutions by amending the Staff Regulations under the procedure in Article 336 TFEU. Third, establishment plans in the annual budget should carry a gender impact assessment, so that the grade pyramid is set with its composition effects visible. Fourth, the incidence of part-time patterns on step progression and pensionable remuneration should be published and monitored, since reduced working time is the one channel that operates after entry to a grade.
None of these measures requires a new policy. Each attaches an existing obligation to an existing procedure: the budget for establishment plans, the discharge for reporting, the Staff Regulations for assessment and enforcement. The wider EPP record on gender equality shows that the family legislates effectively when the instruments are pointed at the labour market. The institutions’ own pay gap persists because, in this one case, they are not.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a gender pay gap in the EU institutions?
Yes, in the unadjusted sense used in Union statistics: the average earnings of women employed in the institutions are lower than the average earnings of men. Because salary is fixed by grade and step under the Staff Regulations, the gap reflects the distribution of men and women across grades, contract types and working-time patterns rather than different pay for the same post.
How large is it?
No institution publishes a figure computed on Eurostat’s method, which is part of the problem. The Union-wide benchmark is 12.7 per cent for 2022 in dataset earn_gr_hgpg. The institutions publish grade distributions instead, and read against the salary table in Annex III those distributions imply a gap driven by function group, contract type and management representation.
Does Directive (EU) 2023/970 apply to EU institutions as employers?
No. The directive binds employers in the Member States, with transposition due by 7 June 2026. The Union institutions as employers are governed by the Staff Regulations and the Conditions of Employment of Other Servants, which contain no reporting duty, joint pay assessment or burden-of-proof rule of the kind the directive imposes on everyone else.
How can a pay gap exist if salaries are fixed by law?
Because the law fixes salary to grade, not to person. Where men and women hold different grades, different contract types and different working-time patterns, identical within-grade pay coexists with a gap in average earnings. The Staff Regulations remove within-grade discrimination; they do not touch the distribution that produces the difference.
What is the EPP’s record on the institutions’ own pay gap?
The record combines strong instruments for the labour market, Recommendation 2014/124/EU, the 2021 proposal and Directive (EU) 2023/970 concluded under an EPP-led Swedish presidency, with voluntary targets for the institutions’ own management. No EPP document in the period extends the directive’s instruments to the Union’s own staff.
Dr. Astrid Halldórsdóttir works on the institutional design of Union gender policy. This analysis draws on the Staff Regulations, the Conditions of Employment of Other Servants, Eurostat dataset earn_gr_hgpg, the annual staff reports of the institutions and the discharge documentation of the European Parliament.
