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This paper presents the annual time series and the average annual growth rate of the European Gender Equality Index, which was proposed by Bericat (Soc Indic Res 108:1-28, ), for the EU and its 27 member countries for the period 2000-2011. The paper also reports the time series and average annual growth rate for each of the three subdimensions of gender equality-education, work, and power-and the underlying indicators for each subdimension for EU as a whole. The calculated index shows that in the period 2000-2011, overall gender equality, equality in education, work, and power in the EU has been improving at a rate of 1.7, 0.92, 0.65, and 3.48 % per year, respectively. By 2011, overall gender equality, and equality in education, work, and power has reached 58.3, 77.4, 60.9, and 42.7, respectively. In short, this paper offers the scientific community, as well as those that design and implement public policies, a robust, valid and precise synthetic description of the current situation and evolution, from 2000 to 2011, of structural gender equality in European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inequality of Opportunity (IO) refers to that inequality stemming from factors, called circumstances, beyond the scope of individual responsibility, such as gender, race, place of birth or socioeconomic background. In general, circumstances do not directly convert into future individual's income. Indeed, different circumstances in childhood lead to different levels of education and different occupational categories which, in turn, contribute to generate divergent levels of income during adulthood. Using the Intergenerational Transmission modules in 2005 and 2011 from the EU-SILC, we estimate the importance of attained education and occupational category as mediating channels in the generation of IO in 26 European countries. We find that the attained level of education channels up to 30% of total IO, with important differences across Europe. Once attained education is taken into account, occupation explains less than 5% of IO in most countries. Moreover, the importance of education as a channel for IO is negatively correlated both with the share of the population that attains tertiary levels of education and with the importance of government expenditure in education relative to GDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]