We talk a lot about the European Union’s commitment to equality. We trot out Article 157 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which states—clearly, unequivocally—that men and women should receive equal pay for equal work. The institutions of the EU aren’t just meant to write the rules for everyone else. They’re supposed to live by them. But they don’t. A hard, measurable gender pay gap sits stubbornly inside the very bodies that draft our equality directives. This isn’t some statistical oddity to be noted in a footnote. It’s a failure that chips away at the moral authority of the entire European project.
I’ve spent the last few months doing something quite old-fashioned: reading. Not just the glossy brochures, but the staff regulations, the annual reports from the Court of Auditors, and the disaggregated data quietly published by the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO). What I found doesn’t call for another round of polite statements about values. It calls for something sharper—a dissection of structural inequities that have been explained away for years instead of being ripped out at the root.
The Architecture of Disparity: More Than a Paycheck
If you just look at the top-line salary figures that get handed to the press, you’ll miss the whole story. The unadjusted gender pay gap in the European Commission has been hovering around 10% lately, according to internal reports. That’s a bit lower than the EU average of roughly 13%. A politician might be tempted to call that progress. I’d call it a distraction. The gap isn’t really about unequal pay for the exact same job—though yes, there are occasional inconsistencies in how recruitment grades get handed out. The real problem is something more entrenched: vertical and horizontal segregation that has hardened inside the institutional hierarchy like old concrete.
Vertical Segregation: The Glass Ceiling at the Berlaymont
Take a walk through the upper floors of the Berlaymont building, where Commissioners and Directors-General keep their offices. You’ll notice something before you even look at a spreadsheet. Women are simply not there in the numbers they should be. They remain seriously underrepresented in senior management grades—AD 14 to 16. The 2022 Commission report on gender balance tells us that women make up more than half of all administrators in the AD category. But at Director level, their share drops off a cliff. At Director-General, it’s even worse. And no, this isn’t a pipeline problem. Women have been the majority of EPSO competition laureates for years. They’re there. They’re qualified. They’re just not being kept or pushed upward. The problem sits in opaque selection procedures and a workplace culture that still rewards a particular model of leadership—one that prizes constant availability and a kind of aggressive self-promotion that many women, sensibly, find exhausting.
Horizontal Segregation: The Value We Assign to Functions
Then there’s the other side of the coin: horizontal segregation. Women tend to cluster in policy domains and support functions that are paid less. Roles in DG Justice and Consumers or DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion are, obviously, vitally important. But when it comes to the internal knife-fights over resources, they carry less weight than jobs in DG Competition, DG Economic and Financial Affairs, or the powerful Secretariat-General. Those latter portfolios, dominated by men, offer a faster track to promotion and bonuses. And we haven’t even talked about the assistants and secretaries—the AST and AST/SC function groups. Overwhelmingly female, they face a compressed salary scale with a low ceiling. These are the people who manage impossible schedules, keep the information flowing, and coordinate multilingual documentation. Their work is the basic plumbing of EU governance. And the grading structure tells them, systematically, that it isn’t worth very much.
The Blind Spots of the EU’s Own Machinery
The EU institutions aren’t sitting still. They’ve rolled out Gender Equality Strategies and set targets for women in management. The Commission hit its 40% target for female senior management by 2019 and has since raised the bar. Good. But targets for representation don’t close a pay gap if the way we value different roles remains tilted. You can promote a woman to head of unit in a smaller, less influential DG, tick a statistical box, and do almost nothing to shift the overall pay differential.
And then there’s the haze of coefficients and allowances. The annual salary adjustments, tied to inflation and the cost of living in Brussels and Luxembourg, apply evenly to everyone. That means they do absolutely nothing to correct inequalities that are already baked in. Family allowances, while generous compared to many national systems, can actually make things worse. The parental leave scheme, which until recently offered a flat-rate allowance far below a full salary, has historically been taken up by women much more often than men. That affects pensionable years and career progression in ways that a man taking a short, strategic leave for a “visible” project simply never experiences.
The Agency and Parliament Problem
Look beyond the Commission and the picture gets messier, though rarely better. In some decentralized agencies—especially those with a technical or regulatory bent—the gender pay gap can be wider. You’ll find a higher proportion of male temporary agents in senior scientific or operational posts. The European Parliament often gets praised for the visibility of its women MEPs, but there’s a stark divide between the elected members and the staff. A 2021 internal study pointed out that within the Parliament’s secretariat, women held 67% of AST posts but only 34% of AD posts at the highest grades. This internal stratification is a mirror of what’s happening in the Commission. It screams out for a single, unified auditing standard across every institution.
A Principled Path to Correction
Fixing this gap means abandoning the soft tools of awareness campaigns and voluntary targets. The principle of equal pay for work of equal value—already a legal standard for member states—needs to be applied to the institutions themselves with forensic precision. Step one: a mandatory, institution-wide job evaluation scheme that is actually free of gender bias. The current split between AST and AD categories is an anachronism that walls off a largely feminised support workforce into a lower pay band. If we reclassified roles based on objective criteria—responsibility, problem-solving, knowledge—I’m fairly confident we’d find that many AST roles are undervalued and should be regraded.
Step two: rip the informal sponsorship out of the promotion procedure. Right now, a recommending officer’s report carries a lot of weight. That makes the system vulnerable to the “mini-me” syndrome, where senior male officials unconsciously favour candidates who look and sound like younger versions of themselves. The fix? Give real teeth to joint promotion committees that include binding gender-balance expertise, and require clear, verifiable justification for every promotion and grading decision—subject to audit.
Step three: full salary transparency. The Commission has started publishing aggregate data, which is fine as far as it goes. But we need anonymized, individual-level salary data, cross-referenced by grade, DG, and years of experience. That’s the only way to allow real external scrutiny. It’s a bit rich for the institutions to demand pay transparency from listed companies in member states through the Pay Transparency Directive while refusing to practice it themselves. The European Ombudsman and the Court of Auditors should be given the power to conduct annual, binding audits on pay equity, with the authority to recommend budgetary corrections for any DG or agency that can’t close unexplained gaps.
Finally, we have to get honest about care work. Parental leave and flexible working arrangements should be redesigned as fully paid, non-transferable periods for both parents, with active incentives for men to take them up. That would start to neutralize the career penalty that currently lands almost entirely on women. We can’t keep structurally punishing people for doing the work of sustaining the next generation.
The gender pay gap in EU institutions isn’t some leftover artefact from a less enlightened time. It’s a daily, active process of undervaluing women’s contributions. To tolerate it is to accept a two-tier citizenship inside Europe’s civil service. A union that was founded on the dignity of the person and the equality of its peoples can’t afford a compromise like that at its own heart.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the gender pay gap in EU institutions simply because more women work in lower-paid support roles?
Horizontal segregation—the clustering of women in AST and AST/SC function groups—does explain a big chunk of the gap, but it’s not the whole story. The real question is why those roles, which demand serious organizational and linguistic skills, are structurally undervalued compared to AD roles. A principled analysis doesn’t just accept that a job done mostly by women is paid less as if it were a law of nature. And remember, a pay gap persists even within the AD category at higher grades, driven by vertical segregation.
Haven’t the EU institutions already fixed this with their Gender Equality Strategies?
The strategies have helped get more women into management, and that’s necessary. It’s just not enough. Hitting a 40% or 50% target for female heads of unit won’t equalize pay if women are nudged into lower-impact units or if the whole grading structure remains biased. A real fix means moving past headcounts and doing a rigorous audit of how every role is valued and compensated. That process still hasn’t been fully rolled out across all institutions and agencies.
Why should the EU institutions be held to a higher standard than private companies?
Because they are the legislative and executive core of the European project. They draft the directives that bind member states—including the ones on pay transparency and gender equality. Article 157 of the TFEU is a direct mandate, not a suggestion. There’s a basic ethical requirement here: the legislator cannot exempt itself from the rules it forces on others. Failing to root out a pay gap inside their own walls eats away at the credibility of the EU’s normative power and its ability to demand reforms from national governments and the private sector.
