Gender Gap Croatia, gender equality, woman at city wall in Dubrovnik
Woman in a summer dress and hat enjoys Dubrovnik's ancient cityscape and sea view | photo Daiana Seeck

Gender Gap Croatia — Tracking the Progress of Women and Girls

HR

Croatia has one of the lowest gender pay gaps in the EU. Its women are among the most highly educated in Europe. And its political representation of women is falling. All three things are true at the same time — and together they tell a more honest story than any single headline.

Gender Gap Croatia — What the Numbers Actually Show

Croatia scored 57.1 points in EIGE’s Gender Equality Index 2025, ranking 21st out of 27 EU member states. The EU average is 63.4. The gap between Croatia and the EU average has been widening, not narrowing — Croatia is improving in absolute terms, but slower than most of its European peers.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 tells a slightly more positive story: Croatia scored 0.728, its first year of improvement after a decline, up from 0.723 in 2024. The WEF and EIGE measure different things in different ways, and the divergence between their findings is itself instructive. The WEF scores Croatia relatively well on economic participation and educational attainment. EIGE’s deeper six-domain analysis reveals that strong performance in some areas — particularly time and money — masks significant underperformance in power.

The World Bank’s February 2024 Croatia Gender Landscape report put the underlying issue plainly: tackling systemic gender inequality can unlock Croatia’s potential. The barriers are not primarily legal. Croatia’s anti-discrimination framework aligns with EU standards. The gaps are structural, cultural, and concentrated in specific domains.

This page examines those domains one by one.

Pay and Economic Participation — SDG Target 5.4

Croatia’s gender pay gap is one of the most discussed and most misunderstood figures in its gender equality picture.

The unadjusted gender pay gap in Croatia sits in the single-digit range — well below the EU average of 11.1% in 2024. On this headline measure, Croatia compares favorably with most of Western Europe. But Eurostat’s own analysis flags that Croatia’s strong headline conceals a much wider part-time split, and that sector composition heavily shapes the number.

That sector composition is striking. In 2022, women made up 78% of workers in healthcare and 80% of workers in education in Croatia — the highest rates of female concentration in these sectors across the entire EU. Both are relatively low-paying sectors compared to finance, technology, or engineering. When women are concentrated in the same lower-paid sectors, the overall pay gap can appear small not because pay is equitable, but because the comparison is being made within already-compressed wage ranges.

The gender employment gap tells a complementary story. In 2024, the gap between men’s and women’s employment rates was 5.9 percentage points — moderate by EU standards, but persistent. The World Bank’s Croatia Gender Landscape found that the employment gap is sharpest among mothers of young children. Women with children under six participate in the labour force at dramatically lower rates, a pattern directly linked to limited affordable childcare and to deeply embedded expectations about who carries domestic and care responsibilities.

SDG Target 5.4 calls for the recognition, reduction, and redistribution of unpaid care and domestic work. EIGE’s Time domain — which measures how care responsibilities are distributed between men and women — is where Croatia actually performs best among all EU members: 6th in the EU with 69.6 points. Yet this relative strength on the time domain has not translated into economic equality, because women’s time spent in unpaid care still limits their professional advancement even when it is comparatively more equally shared than elsewhere.

Power and Political Representation — SDG Target 5.5 and SDG 16.7

This is Croatia’s weakest domain — and the one moving in the wrong direction.

EIGE’s Power domain scored 21.8 points for Croatia in 2025, ranking it 23rd out of 27 EU member states. The EU average for this domain is significantly higher. Croatia is among the five EU countries where the share of women in decision-making has actively fallen in recent years, alongside Bulgaria, Slovakia, Cyprus, and Estonia.

Women currently hold approximately 33.8% of parliamentary seats in the Croatian Parliament. That figure sounds reasonable in isolation, but it masks what is happening at other levels of power. Women’s representation on company boards, in senior public administration, and in local government leadership all lag significantly. The Power domain captures all of these, not just one chamber of parliament.

Croatia has no statutory gender quota for parliamentary elections. The main mechanism for encouraging female candidacy has been voluntary party commitments — which have been inconsistently applied. The World Bank’s Gender Landscape report documented that patriarchal attitudes remain prevalent in Croatian society: 31% of the population holds views that explicitly associate political leadership with men rather than women. These cultural norms affect both candidate recruitment and voter behavior.

SDG Target 5.5 calls for women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making. Croatia’s declining Power domain score is the clearest signal that this target is not currently on track.

Safety — SDG Target 5.2 and SDG 16.1

Croatia ratified the Istanbul Convention in 2018. Its legal framework for protecting women from gender-based violence broadly aligns with EU standards. In practice, however, implementation gaps remain, and the data picture is incomplete.

The most recent EU-comparable figure shows that approximately 3.4% of women aged 15–49 reported physical or sexual violence by a current or former intimate partner in the previous 12 months — a figure from 2018, now seven years old. More recent nationally representative data is limited, which is itself a gap: without current measurements, it is difficult to know whether the situation is improving or deteriorating.

Croatia’s criminal law framework criminalizes domestic violence, stalking, and sexual violence. However, civil society organizations report inconsistent enforcement, particularly outside urban centers. Women’s rights groups in Zagreb, Split, and Rijeka continue to document cases where restraining orders are not effectively monitored and where perpetrators with known histories of violence are not effectively separated from victims.

The EIGE Gender Equality Index 2024 thematic focus was specifically on violence against women — a signal of how central this domain has become to the EU’s gender equality agenda. Croatia’s VAWG profile will be examined in more depth on the VAWG Croatia page.

Education — SDG Target 4.5

Education is where Croatia’s gender gap runs most clearly in women’s favor — and where the paradox of Croatian gender equality is sharpest.

Croatian women significantly outperform men in tertiary education. Women account for the majority of university graduates, and the female completion rate in higher education has risen consistently over the past two decades. By conventional educational attainment measures, Croatian women are among the most highly educated in Europe relative to men.

Yet this educational advantage does not translate proportionally into economic power or political leadership. The World Bank’s Gender Landscape report identified three structural reasons. First, occupational segregation channels women toward lower-paid sectors regardless of their qualifications. Second, the motherhood penalty in Croatia’s labour market is steep — career interruptions for childcare are difficult to recover from in Croatian corporate and public-sector culture. Third, a 2024 Croatian gender barometer found that 31% of the population believes men are inherently more suited to leadership roles — an attitude that limits women’s career advancement even when their qualifications are equal or superior.

EIGE’s Knowledge domain, which measures educational attainment and occupational segregation together, scored 54.2 points for Croatia, placing it 26th in the EU. Despite women’s strong raw attainment, the high degree of occupational segregation pulls the Knowledge domain score down — a reminder that education alone does not close the gender gap when it feeds into segregated labour markets.

The EU Context: Narrowing or Widening?

Croatia joined the EU in 2013. Twelve years later, it remains below the EU average on every major gender equality index. More concerning, the distance between Croatia and the EU average is not shrinking consistently.

EIGE’s 2025 report confirms that Croatia is among the group of Member States falling further behind the rest of Europe on the path to gender equality. Since 2015, Croatia’s EIGE score has increased by 3.0 points — but since 2020 it has increased by only 0.4 points, while the EU average continued rising. The gap is widening in relative terms even as absolute scores improve slightly.

This matters for the EU’s own convergence goals. The ambition of European social union requires member states to move toward each other, not diverge. Croatia’s trajectory — improving slowly in absolute terms while falling relatively behind — is a pattern the European Commission is monitoring closely through its annual gender equality reporting under the European Pillar of Social Rights.

RYB’s Place in This Picture

RYB does not produce the WEF scores, the EIGE index, or the World Bank Gender Landscape analysis cited on this page. Eurostat, EIGE, the World Bank, and Croatia’s own Office for Gender Equality do that work. What RYB does is bring the picture together in plain language and connect it to the global framework it belongs to.

Croatia’s gender equality story is one of real contradictions. A low gender pay gap and strong female educational attainment sit alongside declining political representation and persistent occupational segregation. The country that gave women the vote as part of Yugoslavia’s 1945 constitution still has not reached gender parity in the institutions that govern it.

This is also the data that Culture Women’s Day Croatia exists to surface — the gap between the formal right won on August 11, 1945, and the full, equal political voice that right was meant to open.

World Economic Forum

Global Gender Gap Report Croatia

The Global Gender Gap Report benchmarks countries on their progress towards gender parity across four dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival, and Political Empowerment.

2025
Score: 0.728
› report

2024
Rank: 61 (out of 146 countries)
Score: 0.723

2020
Rank: 60 (out of 153 countries)
Score: 0.720

2017
Rank: 54 (out of 144 countries)
Score: 0.711

2016
Rank: 68 (out of 144 countries)
Score: 0.700

European Institute for Gender Equality

Gender Equality Index — Croatia

EIGE’s Gender Equality Index measures gender equality across six domains: work, money, knowledge, time, power, and health, each scored from 1 (total inequality) to 100 (total equality).

2025
Overall score: 57.1 (EU average: 63.4)
EU rank: 21st out of 27
Best domain: Time — 69.6 (ranked 6th in EU)
Weakest domain: Power — 21.8 (ranked 23rd in EU)
Knowledge domain: 54.2 (ranked 26th in EU)
Change since 2015: +3.0 points | Change since 2020: +0.4 points

› EIGE Croatia 2025 country profile

UN Women

Women Count Data Hub: Croatia

Country Fact Sheet
› data.unwomen.org/country/croatia

Looking Forward

Croatia’s gender equality picture in 2025 is a study in divergence. The pay gap is narrow, educational attainment is high, and the Time domain shows that care responsibilities are more equally shared than in most of Europe. These are genuine strengths.

But the Power domain is declining, the Knowledge domain remains near the bottom of the EU table despite strong female education, and the gap to the EU average is widening. The structural drivers — occupational segregation, the motherhood employment penalty, persistent cultural norms about leadership — are not being addressed at a pace that would change Croatia’s relative position within the EU.

Two things to watch in the coming years: whether the European Pillar of Social Rights process generates new legislative pressure on gender equality in Croatia, and whether Croatia’s progress toward the euro area — it adopted the euro in January 2023 — creates additional convergence incentives on social policy as well as economic policy.

The VAWG Croatia page, coming soon, will examine the safety dimension in more depth — including domestic violence data, legal framework gaps, and the work of Croatian civil society organizations.

Sources

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