Brussels, 18/07/2007 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 18 July, the European Commission approved a communication on bridging the gender pay gap, covering all forms of discrimination, direct and indirect, and all the inequalities affecting women in the labour market and influencing their pay. In the EU, women continue to earn an average of 15% less than men. This situation has barely changed over the past decade, despite the principle of equality of treatment being part of the 1957 Treaty of Rome and a 1975 directive ensuring it was applied. Commissioner Vladimir Spidla believes there is only one solution: “We must shift up gear now. The only way to succeed is by getting men and women, NGOs, social partners and governments on board to tackle the problem at all levels”.
To this end, the communication proposes: (1) better application of the existing legislation (analysing how current laws could be adapted and raising awareness); (2) making reducing the pay gap an integral part of member states' employment policies (exploiting the full potential of EU funding, in particular the EU Social Fund); (3) promoting equal pay, particularly through social responsibility; (4) supporting the exchange of best practice across the EU and involving the social partners.
Mr Spidla told press that the situation was difficult to accept, when one considered that 59% of EU graduates were women. Statistics show that the pay gap grows with age, education and years of service: wage differences are over 30% in the 50-59 age group and 7% in the under-30s. The pay gap is over 30% among graduates and 13% among those with lower secondary education. It can be as much as 32% among workers with over 30 years' experience in a company and 22% for those who have worked for a company for between one and five years. An outraged Mr Spidla added that “in some countries, nannies earn less than car mechanics, nurses less than policemen!” He explained this differential by the fact that jobs which require similar experience or qualifications were usually less well paid when they are dominated by women. Thus it was for professions where the number of women was increasing, such as the press, for example, Mr Spidla noted. Thus the gender pay gap represents the difference between the average gross hourly rate of pay for men and that for women, and reflects the inequalities in the labour market, of which women are, in practice, the main victims, among other things because they have greater difficulty balancing family and profession life and they often have an interrupted career (because, for example, of pregnancies).
The Commission notes some general trends on the pay gap between men and women: (1) in most member states where the level of female employment is low (in Malta, Italy, Greece and Poland, for example) the pay gap is less than the average, as a result of too small a number of unqualified or poorly qualified women in the working population; (2) a wide pay gap is generally indicative of a highly compartmentalised labour market (as is the case in, for example, Cyprus, Estonia, Slovenia and Finland) where women work in a restricted number of sectors or professions; (3) in the countries where there is a substantial proportion of women working part-time (Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden, for example), the pay gap tends to be widest. Mr Spidla pointed out that it is in the financial services sector that the gender pay gap is widest: “lots of women work in this sector. The same cannot be said of the construction sector where there are virtually no women, so the pay gap is virtually zero,” and this is true, too, of the manufacturing industry and business services.
Reacting to this communication, John Monks, the secretary general of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and Zia Gurmai, the president of PES Women in the European Parliament, welcomed that Mr Spidla had proposed action top tackle the gender pay gap and to strengthen European equal opportunities legislation dating from 1975.
The text of the communication is available on:
http: //ec.europa.eu/employment_social/news/2007/jul/genderpaygap_en.pdf (gb)