Progress toward gender pay parity has slowed across the European Union, which means women in some countries could be waiting until at least the turn of the century for equal pay.
(Bloomberg) — Progress toward gender pay parity has slowed across the European Union, which means women in some countries could be waiting until at least the turn of the century for equal pay.
If progress continues at its current pace, men and women won’t be paid the same on average across the bloc until around 2086, according to Bloomberg calculations and Eurostat figures updated on Wednesday. That means a woman born this year could only expect to earn the same as a man around the same time she’s old enough to retire.
The average gap between men and women’s gross hourly earnings stood at 12.7% at the end of 2021, narrowing just 0.2 percentage points from the year before. A dozen countries marked November 15 last year as Equal Pay Day — the date at which women would “work for free” for the rest of the year compared to their male counterparts.
The discrepancies are not evenly spread. In Luxembourg women’s pay overtook that of men by 0.2% in 2021, while the gap dropped to just 5% in Belgium and narrowed further below 10% in Cyprus. Yet the gap in several countries, including Norway, Denmark and Portugal grew, suggesting equality in some places may be getting further out of reach.
The findings come as the EU prepares to vote on new pay transparency rules this month, which include gender equality. If the policy is passed in its current form, publishing pay gaps and the gender split in different pay brackets will become mandatory for employers above a certain size, as is already the case in the UK. The gender pay gap there stood at 14.9% as of April 2022, below the EU average.
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