Just 29.1% of all management positions in Germany were held by women as of 2024, new data from the Federal Statistics Office (Destatis) has found.
This percentage has remained relatively unchanged for a decade, and remains well below the EU average of 35.2%.
According to Destatis, some 540,000 women held managerial roles in Germany in 2024, compared with approximately 1.32 million men.
Other European countries have, for the most part, seen an increase in the percentage of women in leadership positions in recent years – Sweden leads the way with 44.4%, followed by Latvia with 43.4% and Poland with 41.8%.
At the other end of the spectrum, however, Cyprus boasts the lowest percentage of women in management roles (25.3%), followed by Croatia (27.6%) and Italy (27.9%).
Small increase
Between 2014 and 2024, the share of women in management roles in Germany has risen by just 0.1 percentage points, compared to a 3.4-percentage-point increase across the EU.
The largest increases over this period were seen in Malta (+10.3 percentage points), Sweden (+7.3 percentage points), Estonia (+7.2 percentage points), and Cyprus (+7.8 percentage points).
Female employment
Destatis’ data also highlights a gap between female employment and leadership representation – while women made up 46.9% of the employed population in Germany in 2024, slightly above the EU average of 46.4%, this wasn’t reflected in the percentage holding managerial positions.
In neighbouring Austria, for example, the percentage of women in management roles was considerably higher (36.2%), with a comparable share of women in the workforce (47.5%). In Italy, meanwhile, women held 27.9% of leadership roles, a similar level to Germany, though overall female employment there was notably lower, at 42.5%.
The Destatis classification of leadership roles includes directors of small enterprises, managers or department heads of large companies, and senior positions within public administration, as defined under the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) major group 1. Read more here.
