The European Union is preparing to celebrate Equal Pay Day on 3 November – the date which marks when women symbolically stop being paid compared to their male colleagues.
The difference in pay is on average 16.2% (compared with 16.7% the previous year), with significant variations between the member states (25.3% in Estonia and 5.2% in Romania – see EUROPE 11659).
In a joint statement, European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans and Commissioners Marianne Thyssen and Věra Jourová unanimously condemned this situation. "This gender pay gap is not only unfair in principle, but also in practice. It puts women in precarious situations during their careers, and even more so after they retire, with a gender pension gap of 36.6%."
In a press conference on 26 October, Jourová highlighted three sources for this pay gap: the fact that women spend radically more time taking care of families; that some women work in low paid sectors, such as the health sector or education; and that in some cases women are purely and simply the object of discrimination. She thus spoke of the different initiatives on the co-legislators' table to make up for this problem, nevertheless leaving aside the proposal for a directive introducing quotas for women on boards of directors (see EUROPE 11547) – a proposal which has been blocked at the Council for years.
To mark the upcoming European Equal Pay Day, the Commission is publishing a new Eurobarometer which shows that one fifth of Europeans (mostly women) are not happy when it comes to work-life balance. The Eurobarometer can be found at: https://bit.ly/2yzpjAZ. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)