Gender wealth inequality in the European Union: a distributional perspective

Analysis of single women and men in Europe reveals persistent gender wealth gaps and differing patterns across countries

Publishing date: 30 October 2025
Authors: Zsolt Darvas Nina Ruer

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This paper investigates gender-related disparities in wealth in European Union countries using the 2010-2021 waves of the European Central Bank’s Household Finance and Consumption Survey. To address the difficulty of within-household wealth allocation and provide a cleaner comparison of men and women’s wealth positions, we focus on single, never-married individuals aged 25-65, without dependants.

A full-sample regression controlling for demographic, labour market and socioeconomic characteristics does not reveal a statistically significant gender wealth gap in the EU overall, or in most EU countries. When examining the wealth gap against wealth distribution, we find negligible gaps among the less wealthy. However, we find significant gaps among the middle class and the wealthiest individuals. This distributional disparity was barely visible in 2010 but had become pronounced by 2021, suggesting that gender-based wealth disparities have widened over time. Men are more likely to own property, operate businesses and invest in risky financial assets, which are all major drivers of wealth. By contrast, women hold more bank deposits and low-risk assets. Although women have higher educational attainment, which is typically associated with greater wealth, this advantage does not fully translate into financial outcomes. Finally, we document substantial cross-country differences, possibly shaped by cultural norms, institutional settings, labour market histories and inheritance regimes.

We thank Roel Dom for his detailed and insightful comments on an earlier draft, and Alexandre Mendonça and Bruegel research meeting participants for their helpful suggestions.

About the authors

Zsolt Darvas

Zsolt Darvas is a Senior Fellow at Bruegel and a part-time Senior Research Fellow at the Corvinus University of Budapest. He joined Bruegel in 2008 as a Visiting Fellow, and became a Research Fellow in 2009 and a Senior Fellow in 2013.

From 2005 to 2008, he was the Research Advisor of the Argenta Financial Research Group in Budapest. Before that, he worked at the research unit of the Central Bank of Hungary (1994-2005) where he served as Deputy Head.

Zsolt holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Corvinus University of Budapest where he teaches courses in Econometrics but also at other institutions since 1994. His research interests include macroeconomics, international economics, central banking and time series analysis.

Personal website: https://www.darvas.online/
Nina Ruer

Nina worked at Bruegel as a Research Analyst. She holds a master's of research (MRes) in Analysis and Policy in Economics from the Paris School of Economics (PSE). Her master's thesis, titled "The Gender Pay Gap in Student Employment in France," was a comprehensive study that delved into income disparities among university students in France. Prior to that, she earned a BSc in Economics with a final year in "Magistère" from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Prior to joining Bruegel, she was a research assistant on a series of projects funded by PSE where she gained hands-on experience in finding and cleaning replication datasets for Randomized Control Trials (RCTs). She also developed multiple surrogate index functions for long-term forecasting. Another set of projects focused on collecting subjective forecasts, where she assessed the calibration of various groups for forecast accuracy.

Nina is a dual Dutch and French citizen and is a French native speaker, fluent in Dutch and English.