Cluster Analysis of the European Union Gender Equality and Economic Development

Purpose – The article aims at discovering classes and clusters of EU member-statesconsidering their levels of economic development and gender equality to foster the enhance-ment of EU cohesion policy.Research methodology – The methodology includes the grouping by two parameters, economicdevelopment and gender equality, and the cluster analysis, the “far neighbor principle”, agglom-erative hierarchical classification algorithm and the usual Euclidean distance as the distancebetween objects.Findings – There are no gender equality laggards among EU member-states. More developedcountries belong to gender equality leaders, while there are two gender equality leaders andone gender equality adopter among transition countries. The group of less developed countriesconsists of six gender equality leaders and seven gender equality adopters.Research limitations – The results of cluster analysis may be impacted by off-shore activity ofIreland and Luxembourg.Practical implications – The EU supranational bodies can use our results to develop more ef-ficient cohesion policy tools to ensure the adherence to the principle of gender equality.Originality/Value – The study is a pioneer one in determining nine classes and five clustersof EU member-states considering their levels of economic development and gender equality,as well as in introducing three types of countries depending on their level of gender equality,namely gender equality leaders, adopters, and laggards