Europe’s creator economy reached $32.8 billion in 2025 and is expected to exceed $157 billion by 2032. The figures look like a celebration of a new era of digital work. But behind them lies a structural problem: women carry most of the creator economy on their shoulders, yet its profits are shared unevenly.
The Kolsquare and NewtonX Voices of the Creator Economy 2025 survey, which mapped 783 verified creators in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries, shows concrete figures. While 53% of men manage all the running of their content on their own, the figure for women is 73%. Three quarters of women creators therefore work without a team, without an assistant, without support. They write their own scripts, film, edit, negotiate with partners, keep the accounts and manage the community. And yet they earn less: 38% of women in the European creator economy receive less than €500 a month, compared with 23% of men.
Why does this happen? Part of the answer lies in the segments women occupy. Lifestyle, beauty, family care and children’s education. These areas have high content output but lower average value for advertisers than gaming, tech or financial content, where men dominate. Even in overlapping categories such as lifestyle, travel and wellness, women receive fewer brand collaborations. The same reachable audience, but a different price.
Success takes time, and that time is not shared equally
On top of this comes invisible work. The creator economy likes to present itself as a meritocracy: whoever makes quality content succeeds. The reality is more complicated. Quality content takes time. And women’s time, as in the traditional economy, is systematically squeezed by care of the home and family, and by unpaid obligations that men on average do not have. In 2024, Eurostat recorded a gender pay gap in the EU of 11.1% in the traditional economy. The creator economy has not erased this gap. It has carried it into a different environment, where it is less visible, because there is no employer to point to.
The survey also captured one more factor: 65% of European creators feel stressed by deadlines and pressure to produce content. It is not hard to guess who feels that pressure most. Those who also handle everything alone. Burnout is not just a personal failure. It is a systemic outcome of a model in which creators are expected to be constantly present, while resources and support are distributed unequally.
Hope in the form of European regulation
European regulation is beginning to take an interest in the creator economy. The European Commission’s forthcoming Digital Fairness Act, whose consultation closed in October 2025, focuses primarily on protecting consumers from dark patterns and on transparency in influencer marketing. These are legitimate goals. But standards that would address structural inequalities within the creator economy itself, for example through transparency about the pay for brand deals or support for creators working without a team, are nowhere on the horizon yet. Regulators see the creator economy as a market where the customer needs protecting. They lack a view of it as a labour market where the worker needs protecting.
The paradox is visible: an industry that offers flexibility and autonomy as its greatest asset reproduces labour inequalities that the traditional employment market at least formally recognises and tries to address. The EU Pay Transparency Directive, which will take effect in member states over the coming years, does not apply to self-employed creators. Brands are not required to disclose how much they pay women and how much they pay men for comparable collaborations.
As long as the creator economy remains an analytically invisible category, without gender-specific statistics and a regulatory framework to match, the problem will deepen in proportion to how fast the market grows. €157 billion by 2032 is a big number. The question is who will really benefit from it.
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