Cultural employment grew by over 5%, above the increase of 4.5% seen in the European community.

“In 2022, the cultural sector of the EU employed 7.7 million people, representing 3.8% of total employment. Compared to 2021, there was an increase of 4.5%,” the statistics office underlines.

In the last year, employment in culture grew in 19 of the EU Member States, with the most significant rises being registered in Cyprus (21.5%), Luxembourg (14.5%) and Ireland (14%).

Portugal also appeared among these countries whose number of cultural employees grew in 2022, the sector saw 197.8 thousand workers, above the 187.7 thousand job posts recorded the year before.

Everything said and done, there was a 5.4% increase in cultural employment in Portugal, a change that surpasses the community average, although it’s far from the best performances seen among the Member States.

On the other hand, employment in Portugal’s cultural sector represented 4% of total employment, 0.1% above the previous year and 0.2% above the EU average.

In contrast, employment in culture shrunk in eight EU countries: Bulgaria (-7.7%), Czechia (-7.3%), and Croatia (-6.3%) were the biggest losers.

The details published by Eurostat also allow some insight into the evolution of the gender gap when it comes to employment in the cultural sector. There’s good news to share; in 2022, the culture sector recorded the lowest gap in employment between men and women ever, with “a difference of only 1.6%.”

In other words, last year there were 3.9 million men employed in culture, equivalent to 50.8% of the sector’s workforce, and 3.8 million women, corresponding to 49.2%.

Among the Member States, Malta stands out as the country with the biggest gender gap: 21.6 percentage points, but there are also countries where there are more women than men employed in the sector, as is the case with Latvia (26.3% in the girls’ favour), Lithuania (25.7%), and Cyprus (17.1%).