🎙 What is Inequity ? Let's start from the Starting Point
Our first episode of Inequity just went live : you can listen to it now, wherever you get your podcasts.
It's the first of what we hope will be a long series of uncomfortable conversations about equity, fairness, and the state of the European Union.
The episode speaks for itself : that's where the story lives and where it's meant to be heard first. This piece is simply for those who want to go a little further : the full sources behind the numbers, laid out in writing so you can follow the trail yourself, share a link with someone who asks "wait, is that actually true?", or just sit with the data a little longer than an audio format allows.
Why we needed three words, not just one
Our episode opens with a distinction, most of us have never had to make out loud : inequality, injustice and inequity are not synonyms.
Inequality is a photograph, a raw and morally neutral gap between two outcomes. Injustice requires a rule, a violation and a culprit.
Inequity sits in between : a gap nobody "stole" through any single wrongdoing, yet one that was never accidental either built, as the episode puts it, "brick by brick, out of collective decisions."
That distinction isn't just wordplay but it's the analytical tool we'll use in every episode to ask the same question about a different part of European life : was this difference simply how things turned out, or was it something we built and then stopped noticing ?
The story behind Partenope and Mila
The episode illustrates this with two fictional newborns : one born in Milan and one in the Severozapaden region of northwestern Bulgaria on the same Tuesday. The names are invented but the numbers behind them aren't.
Income :  Severozapaden is consistently identified as one of the poorest regions in the entire European Union by GDP per capita, sitting at a small fraction of the EU average. At the national level, Bulgaria's average gross annual wage in industry, construction and market services was €12,388 in 2022 compared to an EU-wide average income per capita closer to €20,900 the same period, according to INSEE's analysis of Eurostat wage structure data.
Life expectancy : According to Eurostat's most recent regional data, Bulgarian regions — Severozapaden among them — recorded the lowest life expectancy at birth of any NUTS-2 region in the European Union in 2024, at roughly 74 years, against an EU average above 81 years. That's not a gap inherited from decades ago, it's the most recent full-year data available.
Poverty risk : Â Here we want to be precise because precision is the whole point of this project. At the national level, Eurostat's 2025 AROPE indicator (people at risk of poverty or social exclusion) places Bulgaria at 29.0%, the highest rate of any EU member state, according to Eurostat data reported by Euronews in May 2026.
The same report identifies 20 EU regions where at least a third of the population is at risk of poverty or social exclusion (four of them in Bulgaria alone). Some secondary sources, drawing on regional Eurostat breakdowns, put Severozapaden specifically above 40% on this measure.
And the EU average for comparison : Across the whole Union, 92.7 million people — 20.9% of the population, nearly one in five — were at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2025.
What this has to do with a passport
Both Partenope and Mila hold, in principle, the exact same European citizenship. The treaties they're born under promise equal dignity, equal opportunity and freedom of movement. What they don't promise — and this is the line the episode keeps circling back to — is that citizenship translates into comparable material conditions.
That gap is what the rest of this season is going to be about, one policy area at a time.
What's coming next on Inequity : the same job, a different paycheck
This episode zero closes on a question we'll open the next episode with : how can the same job, the same shift, the same eight a.m. clock-in be worth twice as much money two hundred kilometres away, inside the same European Union ?
Part of the answer is already visible in Eurostat's own minimum wage data. As of January 1, 2025, the European Union's highest statutory minimum wage was roughly 4.8 times its lowest, according to Eurostat's minimum wage report cited by REIF-EU.
Five member states — Denmark, Italy, Austria, Finland and Sweden — have no statutory minimum wage at all, relying instead on collective bargaining.
And under the EU's 2022 Adequate Minimum Wages Directive, only three countries — France, Portugal and Slovenia — currently meet the recommended benchmark of a minimum wage above 60% of the national median wage.
We'll unpack all of that, with sources, in the next episode.
Sources
Eurostat / Euronews, La fracture de la pauvreté en Europe : quelles sont les villes et les régions les plus et les moins exposées ?, May 2026 — AROPE rates by country and region, 2025 data
Insee, Salaires, niveaux de vie et pauvreté en Europe — France, portrait social — Eurostat Structure of Earnings Survey, 2022 data on Bulgarian wages
Eurostat, provisional life expectancy estimates by NUTS-2 region, 2024
Eurostat, minimum wage statistics as of January 1, 2025, via REIF-EU, Analyse par Eurostat des salaires minimaux des pays de l'UE, April 2025
Directive (EU) 2022/2041 of October 19, 2022, on adequate minimum wages in the European Union
Drees, Personnes pauvres et modestes en Europe : qui sont-elles ?, Études et Résultats n°1349, September 2025 — poverty thresholds in purchasing power standards across EU member states
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