Teaching profession increasingly feminised in early school years

In all EU Member States, the teaching staff was in 2013 predominantly female, with shares ranging from more than 80% in Estonia (88.2%), Latvia (83.2%) and Lithuania (81.2%) to less than 65% in Greece (62.9%) and Spain (63.9%). At EU level, 7 persons out of 10 working as teaching staff were women.

Female teachers are largely over-represented in the early education stages, new data from Eurostat shows, with all teachers in EU pre-primary level teachers being 95.1% women.

Across member states, this share stood at below 95% only in France (83.0%) the Netherlands (86.6%) and the United Kingdom (90.0%). In ten Member States, the share of female teachers at pre-primary level exceeded 99%: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Romania and Slovakia.

A similar situation can be observed for primary education, although less distinctly. The largest shares of female teachers at this level were registered in Lithuania and Slovenia (both 97.1%), followed by the Czech Republic (96.8%), Italy (95.9%) and Hungary (95.6%). In contrast, Greece (69.9%), Spain (75.9%), Luxembourg (76.0%) and Sweden (77.0%) had the lowest shares. At EU level, 85.2% of primary school teachers were women in 2013.

In 2013, 8.3 million persons worked as teaching staff (from pre-primary to tertiary level) in the European Union (EU), of which 5.8 million (70%) were women.

Of the whole teaching staff working in the EU, 820 000 persons (nearly 10% of the total) were under 30 years old and 2.9 million (around 36%) were aged 50 or older. The share of teachers aged 50 or older was highest in secondary schools (39.2%) and at tertiary education level (36.1%).

Men only predominant among tertiary level teaching staff

The situation is more balanced in secondary education, where the share of female teachers stands at 64.0% on average in the EU. Only in tertiary education were men predominant: overall in the EU, women accounted for 41% of the teaching staff. At this level, women were under-represented in every EU Member State, except Latvia (56.3%), Lithuania (55.5%) and Finland (50.7%).