Nearly three quarters of the State’s top earners are men, new figures from the Central Statistics Office’s (CSO) show.
The agency’s latest distribution of earnings by gender and county report indicated that males accounted for 72.4 per cent of earners in the top one per cent bracket in 2024 and for 61 per cent of earners in the top 25 per cent.
The figures showed that female PAYE workers, working at least 50 weeks a year, earned on average 30 per cent less than their male counterparts last year, (€49,022 versus €63,520).
In Dublin, the pay gap was even larger at 32 per cent (€56,584 versus €74,687).
READ MORE
The proportion of women in the top one per cent earnings bracket has increased by 8.1 percentage points (to 27.6 per cent) since 2014, which the CSO said was “the highest proportion of female employments in this earnings bracket since the series began in 2011″.
Gender representation across total employments was relatively equal, the report said.
Of employments active for at least 50 weeks of the year, males accounted for 50.6 per cent, while females accounted for 49.4 per cent.
Males represented a higher proportion of the total employments in eight of the 13 sectors of the economy.
In terms of the distribution of earnings by region of residence, Dublin had the highest average annual earnings in 2024 at €65,822, 17 per cent above the national average (€56,356).
[ Gen Z want managers to change the way we workOpens in new window ]
Dublin was followed by Kildare (€60,121), Wicklow (€59,827), Cork (€57,273), and Meath (€56,669). The lowest average annual earnings were recorded in Donegal (€43,445), Monaghan (€44,045), and Longford (€45,056) in 2024.
The CSO noted that the disparity in median (middle value) annual earnings recorded for employments among males and females varied by county.
In 2024, employments among males in Sligo recorded median annual earnings 7.7 per cent higher than those among females, while in Kildare median annual earnings among males were 29.6 per cent higher than their female counterparts.
Should we put more money into Irish soccer?
In general, counties with the highest earnings tended to have bigger gender pay disparities.
Keith Butler from financial services intermediary Ask Acorn said: “The CSO’s latest figures show that women are consistently underrepresented among higher earners – making up just 39 per cent of the top 25 per cent of incomes and only 28 per cent of the top 1 per cent.”
“Even in sectors where women dominate the workforce, like health and education, they are far less likely than men to feature among the highest earners,” he said.
“Our own research (a survey of 1000 adults throughout the country conducted by IReach) from earlier this year shows that this gender pay gap translates into a 40 per cent pension gap, leaving women far less financially secure in retirement,” Mr Butler said.
