The number of women employed in Ireland has jumped by 82 per cent since 2000, according to new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
The agency’s latest women in the labour market report indicated the number of women in employment in the Irish labour market stood at 1.3 million in the final quarter of 2025.
This represented an 82.1 per cent increase on the 729,900 women registered as being in employment in 2000.
At the same time, the number of women who reported their principal economic status as “engaged in home duties” has fallen significantly, declining 61.8 per cent from 520,500 in 2010 to 198,800 in 2025.
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Women represented over three-quarters (75.9 per cent) of employees in the human health and social work sector, and just under three-quarters of the education sector (74.9 per cent), the agency said.
It also noted more than six in ten (63.6 per cent) women in employment had a third level degree compared with 52.8 per cent of males.
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While the median (middle value) weekly earnings among women in employment rose by 39.2 per cent between 2014 (€469.85) and 2024 (€654.07), it was still 23 per cent less than the median weekly earnings for male employees.
The figures indicate median weekly earnings among male employees over the same period, rose by 36.5 per cent, from €587.52 in 2014 to €802.14 in 2024.
The proportion of women among the top 1 per cent of earners increased by five percentage points from 22.6 per cent in 2019 to 27.6 per cent in 2024, while the proportion of women in employment with earnings in the top 10 per cent rose from 27.9 per cent to 30.6 per cent over the same period.
In 2022, the CSO noted the Gender Pay Gap (GPG), which was measured as the average difference between male and female hourly earnings, was 9.6 per cent, with mean hourly earnings for males at €27.73 and €25.06 for women.
CSO’s statistician Colin Hanley said the release aims “to provide insights on women in the labour market, in terms of both employment and earnings, by combining and analysing statistics provided in existing releases such as the Labour Force Survey, Earnings Analysis using Administrative Data Sources, and Structure of Earnings Survey (SES)”.
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