In 2023, 3.7m women held managerial positions in the EU, compared with 3.1m in 2014, says the EU Labour Force Survey. Whilst women accounted for 46.4% of those employed in Europe last year, they held only 34.8% of managerial positions. Despite an improvement on 2014 (31.8%), parity is still a long way off. This significant increase masks major disparities between member states.
Luxembourg, in particular, stands out for its marked under-representation of women. With only 22.2% female managers in 2023, Luxembourg is at the bottom of the European league, ahead of Croatia (23.8%) and the Czech Republic (27.4%), and far behind Sweden (43.7%), Latvia (42.9%) and Poland (42.3%). This status quo raises questions, even though many countries are making significant progress.
Twenty countries have seen an increase since 2014, with Cyprus (+10.5%), Malta (+8.3%) and Sweden (+6.5%) recording the biggest rises. Conversely, some countries have seen their share of female managers fall, such as Hungary and Slovenia (-2.6%), or Lithuania (-1.7%). In Luxembourg, the situation remains stable.
The situation between 2014 and 2023 has hardly improved in Luxembourg. Graph: Eurostat
Whilst the increase in the number of women in senior management positions is real, it remains uneven and fragile. The current results raise the question of public and private initiatives to improve parity in decision-making bodies. Some countries have chosen to accelerate this process with quotas imposed on boards of directors. In Belgium, for instance, the 38% mark was passed in 2023. Luxembourg could follow suit to catch up.
This article was originally published in French.
