On Friday 4 October, the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat) published its annual report on equality and non-discrimination in the EU.
Using data from across the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), this publication examines inequalities between different social groups. The statistics are broken down according to several discrimination criteria, including gender, age, disability, citizenship and country of origin.
Job market. The employment rate for people aged between 20 and 64 is 76.6% for those born in the EU with two parents born in the EU, but falls to 69.9% for people born abroad. Women with children continue to have an employment rate 17 points lower than men. The gender gap is particularly noticeable in part-time employment, where 27.9% of women work part-time, compared with just 7.7% of men.
Education. In 2023, 38.7% of adults (aged 25-54) had a higher education qualification. However, 32.7% of foreign-born people had a low level of education, compared with only 14.7% of native-born people.
Health. In terms of health, the report notes that around 3.8% of people aged 16 and over in the EU reported unmet medical needs in 2023, a figure that rises to 7.4% for people with disabilities. In some countries, the discrepancies are glaring: in Greece, 32.6% of people with disabilities reported unmet medical needs, compared with 3.3% of the non-disabled population.
Income and living conditions. Data on poverty reveal that 20.9% of people in the EU are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, a crucial indicator for understanding living conditions.
Violence and discrimination. In 2023, 19.6% of people would have been victims of discrimination. Young people aged 16 to 29 reported a particularly high rate of discrimination (28%), particularly on the grounds of ethnic origin (12%) and sexual orientation (8%). In terms of personal safety, around 22% of women and 15% of men avoided certain places because of concerns for their safety. This feeling of insecurity is even more pronounced among people from minority backgrounds, 35% of whom avoided certain public spaces for fear of becoming victims of crime motivated by prejudice.
The report: https://aeur.eu/f/dr2 (Original version in French by Nithya Paquiry)