If Europe-wide initiatives had more legal weight, European men and women should have been paid equally for 60+ years. As early as the Treaty of Rome of 1957, equal pay was established as a constituent principle of the European Community.
As the EU has grown together, the issue has been emphasised several times, for example through the "Equal Treatment Directive" 2006/54/EC and related recommendations in 2014 (2014/124/EU).
However, the reality has always been and remains different: According to EU data, the pay gap between men and women is currently still around 14 per cent.
The Commission's latest proposal (COM/2021/93) has three objectives: Creating wage transparency, concretising key concepts of equal pay in a practical way and establishing enforcement mechanisms in the interests of workers.
Job evaluation as a means of choice runs through the entire draft.
Equal pay is not understood as equal pay for all. Rather, "any differences in pay must be based on objective, gender-neutral criteria." These criteria also form the basis for assessing work of equal value. The Commission mentions here "educational, training and occupational requirements, qualifications, workload and responsibility, work performed and the nature of the tasks performed."
There also seems to be a broad consensus that job evaluation should be analytical, thorough and objective, which could have a positive impact on the quality of the widespread evaluation and (collectively agreed) grading procedures.
Equal pay in the United Kingdom is governed by the Equality Act 2010, with Gender Pay Gap reporting regulations introduced in 2017. From that point on, regulations state that all companies with more than 250 employees must report their gender pay gap on their own website and to the Government. Organisations who cannot provide a satisfactory explanation for any pay inequality face unlimited fines.
In the USA, the governing federal law regarding pay equity is the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a legislation prohibiting gender-based wage discrimination between men and women in the same organisation. There is no requirement to report pay data, but the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act means each paycheck containing compensation discrimination is a separate, new violation - making it easier for employees to claim.
In Spain, decree 902/2020 takes effect in April 2021 and requires companies to keep an annual remuneration register covering all employees - including executives and senior managers. It must contain average and median pay data (for the 30 most often used salary types) broken down by gender, fringe benefits broken down by gender, and the appropriate professional classification. An explanation for any gender pay gap above 25% must be included.
