In the General Election 2024, 44 women were elected to a quarter (25%) of seats in the new Dáil, up from 23% elected in 2020.
The proportion of men in managerial occupations was 61.6% compared with 38.4% of women in the second quarter of 2024.
In 2023, the percentage of female farm holders was 13.2%, compared with 13.4% in 2020.
Three females under the age of 18 years married in 2023, compared with 13 females under the age of 18 years marrying in 2019.
One in four females reported experiencing sexual violence as an adult with a partner, as reported in the CSO’s Sexual Violence Survey 2022.
Ireland's UN SDGs – Goal 5 Gender Equality 2024 is an update of the previous release in the series from the Central Statistics Office (CSO). These releases monitor and report on how Ireland is progressing towards meeting its targets under the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
The CSO works with government departments and other organisations to bring together the data required for reporting on Ireland’s SDGs. This collaboration is formalised under the SDG Data Governance Board, which meets on a quarterly basis. The release for Goal 5 was developed in collaboration with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.
This is the fifth release in this series and includes data for Ireland for each of the SDG indicators selected by the UN to measure Goal 5 Gender Equality. Data are available at various levels of detail which include geography, gender, age group and other categories, where relevant, in accordance with the Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics.
This report on Goal 5 has 14 indicators which are organised into three user friendly chapters:
The titles of these chapters are based around common themes in the nine targets which are measured in Goal 5.
The 17 UN SDGs are a set of global development targets adopted by the UN member countries in September 2015 to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. The UN SDGs are driving the global development agenda towards 2030 (Agenda 2030) and address global challenges including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The 17 goals are interconnected, and to leave no one behind, the aim is to achieve them all by 2030. They recognise that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and help economic growth, while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.
The CSO, Ordnance Survey Ireland* (OSi) and Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri-Ireland) established a project team in April 2017 to engage with a combined UN Statistics Division (UNSD)/Esri research exercise with a goal to develop and deploy a new approach for monitoring the UN SDG Indicators using geographic information systems. The result of this exercise is a new website (Ireland's SDGs Data Hub), hosted on OSi's GeoHive platform, which is Ireland’s Central Portal for all SDGs and contains indicators data on the 17 UN SDGs for Ireland. All the indicators in this release will be loaded onto the GeoHive. This work has been formalised through the creation of Ireland’s Institute for SDGs (IIS) - an initiative between the CSO, OSi and Department of Environment, Climate and Communications (DECC). The membership of the IIS is expected to expand with ongoing monitoring and reporting of Ireland's progress towards meeting UN SDGs.
*Tailte Eireann is an independent Government agency formed by the merger of the Property Registration Authority (PRA), the Valuation Office, and Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI), on 01 March 2023.
Learn about our data and confidentiality safeguards, and the steps we take to produce statistics that can be trusted by all.
Statistician's Comment
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (26 February 2025) published Ireland's UN SDGs indicators data for Goal 5 Gender Equality 2024.
Commenting on the release, Mary Smyth, Statistician, said:
"This latest report on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) has data on 14 indicators for Ireland, divided over three chapters: End Discrimination and Violence, Equality, and Empowerment. Data are presented in categories relevant to the indicators and geographical location, where possible. The UN SDGs and their associated indicators are, by design, wide-ranging in their coverage. As a result, the Irish data is provided by a number of sources including government departments, official organisations, and international organisations such as the UN. This release for Goal 5 was developed in collaboration with the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.
The Results
Looking at election results, a quarter (25%) of seats in the 2024 general election were won by women, 44 out of 174 seats. No women were elected in 14 of the 43 constituencies, while the majority of seats were won by women in five out of the 43 constituencies. A further three constituencies elected equal numbers of men and women. In the previous general election in 2020, women won 36 seats, accounting for 23% of the total (note: the total number of seats increased from 160 to 174 from 2020 to 2024).
There has been a steady rise in the proportion of females in managerial occupations. The proportion of female managers went up from 33.7% in 2020 to 38.4% in 2024 (CSO, Labour Force Survey).
In terms of farm ownerships, the 13.2% of female farm holders recorded in the CSO's Farm Structure Survey 2023 was a slight fall from 13.4% in 2020. However, over the 10-year period from 2013 to 2023, there was an increase in the percentage of female farm holders from 11.9% to 13.2%.
CSO data also shows that three females under the age of 18 years married in 2023. No females under 18 years old married in 2022. Two females under the age of 18 years married in 2020 and only one female in 2021, compared with 13 females in 2019.
Women were more likely to experience sexual violence as an adult with a partner (25%) than men who experienced sexual violence with a partner (6%), as reported in the CSO’s Sexual Violence Survey 2022. Just over a third of adults (34%) who experienced sexual violence as an adult with a non-partner experienced it with a friend/acquaintance."