From today, European women work for free



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SEXISM – This Saturday, November 3rd is the European Day of Equal Pay 2018. European women gaining 16.2% less than their male colleagues, it's as if they were working for free for the next two months. And the French women are not the most well off.

– Mathilde Roche

In 2018, women earn on average 16.2% less than their male counterparts. In other words, when a European worker earns one euro, his colleague earns only 84 cents. This year, the European Day of Equal Pay is 3 November. It symbolically marks the day when women work "for nothing". The date is set according to an average, since the pay gap between men and women varies from 5.2% (Romania) to 25.3% (Estonia) according to Eurostat figures from 2018. An impressive difference between Member States that member states are struggling to reduce.

Different factors explain why the pay gap remains today. First, differences in career path, which makes their professional activity less rewarding. Women work more often on a part-time basis, and in lower-paying sectors, such as personal care. They also face the glbad ceiling in companies, that is to say they have less access to positions of responsibility. And it is still she who is too often responsible when it comes to caring for their family, children or dependent relatives.

This gross wage gap, unfair on principle, gives rise to other inequalities. This not only plunges women into precarious situations during their careers, but the situation only worsens after retirement, since the difference in pension levels between men and women is then 36.6%.

Taking into account all the economic consequences created by wage inequality, Eurostat also gives the difference between the average annual earnings of women and men. It takes into account three types of disadvantages that women face: lower hourly earnings; working fewer hours in paid jobs and lower employment rates. The overall pay gap between men and women in France is 39.6% in the European Union and 31% in France.

In France, while women's rights have been designated "Great national cause" by Emmanuel Macron, equal pay is far from being achieved. The difference in average gross hourly wages between women and men is still, according to Eurostat, 15.2%. Although we have seen an improvement since the 15.7% of 2011, this remains an extremely weak progression. As the Les Glorieuses feminist newsletter rightly points out, "at this rate, we will have to wait 150 years to achieve equality … to be in the year 2168".

It is therefore clear that for all these figures, France is barely below average at the European level. We are pale against countries with lower GDP per capita, such as Romania (5.2%), Poland (7.2%) or even Greece (12.5%). Worse, if we exclude the differences in career paths (part-time work, glbad ceiling, etc.), equal pay still suffers from a gap of 9% to the disadvantage of women, according to the latest figures from the INSEE, taken over in 2018 by the State Secretariat for Equality between Women and Men.

Labor Minister Muriel Pénicaud is working hard to come up with measures to help reduce this gap. . Last month, she said she gave three years to companies with more than 50 employees to address the situation of wage inequality. If the results are not there, they could incur a penalty equivalent to 1% of their turnover.

Mathilde Roche

Update :

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