In 2016, there were ten EU Member States where the proportion of young female NEETs (neither in employment nor in education) was at least 10.0 percentage points higher than the corresponding share for young men. Among these, the difference between the sexes was within the range of 10–12 percentage points in the United Kingdom, Poland and Malta, rising to 13–15 points in Greece, Estonia, Romania and Hungary, before peaking at 17.2 in Slovakia and 20.0 points in the Czech Republic; an even wider gender gap was recorded in Turkey (38.3 points).

Among people aged 25–29 and those aged 30–34, female NEET rates were consistently higher than male NEET rates in all of the EU Member States. For the first of these two age groups, the biggest gender gaps were recorded in Estonia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where NEET rates for women were 18.9–23.2 percentage points higher than those for men. The differences between the sexes were generally more pronounced among people aged 30–34, as gender gaps of more than 20.0 percentage points were recorded in Slovakia, Hungary and Malta, while the gap in the Czech Republic rose to 28.4 percentage points.

The share of young (aged 20–34) male NEETs in the EU-28 who were unemployed was 57.9 %, while 42.1 % of young male NEETs were inactive. In contrast, the share of young female NEETs who were unemployed was 30.8 %, while 69.2 % were inactive; as such, almost twice as many young female NEETs were inactive. This ratio — between the share of female NEETs who were inactive compared to the share who were unemployed — rose considerably higher in a number of the EU Member States: with more than four times as many young female NEETs being inactive in the United Kingdom, Germany, Estonia, Bulgaria, Malta and Hungary and up to 5.6 times as many in Romania and the Czech Republic.

In 2016, there were only five EU Member States where fewer than half of young male NEETs aged 20–24 were unemployed — Romania, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark and Bulgaria. At the other end of the range, more than three-quarters of young male NEETs aged 20–24 in Greece, Spain and Slovakia were unemployed. Within this same age group, the share of male NEETs who were unemployed was at least twice as high as the corresponding share among female NEETs in Germany, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic. There was almost no gender gap in Denmark, Croatia and Portugal, as the proportion of male and female NEETs who were unemployed remained relatively similar.

There were only four EU Member States where fewer than half of young female NEETs aged 30–34 were inactive — Slovenia, Spain, Portugal and Greece. In contrast, more than four fifths of young female NEETs aged 30–34 in Finland, the Netherlands, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, Ireland, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania were inactive. Within this same age group, the proportion of female NEETs who were inactive was higher than the corresponding share among male NEETs in all EU Member States for which data are available. The share of female NEETs aged 30–34 who were inactive was twice as high as the corresponding share among male NEETs of the same age in Slovakia, Spain and Greece.

Young people aged 20–24 with a low level of education systematically recorded higher NEET rates than those with an intermediate level of education. The difference between these two rates was most pronounced in Sweden, France and the Czech Republic, where NEET rates for people aged 20–24 with a low level of education were five times or more as high as for those with an intermediate level.

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Source: Eurostat