Gender inequality: pay gaps also exist between companies

On 24 October 2023, Icelandic women, including former Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, went on strike to protest against the pay gap between men and women, for equivalent jobs and equal skills. Although the country is the world champion in terms of gender equality according to the World Economic Forum's international rankings, the island's women still earn on average 9% less than their male counterparts.

When the Beijing agreements on gender equality were signed in1995, the gender pay gap in the European Union was 27%. Over the course of ten years, it went down from 17.6% to 12.7% in 2021. Progress now seems to be stagnating, with wide disparities between countries. Romania leads the way with 3.6%, while Estonia's gap, although significantly reduced, remains at the bottom of the table at 20.5%. In France, the gap has stagnated at around 15% for the last twenty years. These differences are calculated on an hourly basis and do not take into account part-time work. They can be explained by the role assigned to women in raising children and the impact of motherhood on the development of women's careers.

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Economists Jan-Luca Hennig and Balazs Stadler attempt to gain a better understanding of these figures using data from the European Structure of earnings survey. They focused on the role of companies in these inequalities. With their article "Firm-specific pay premiums and the gender wage gap in Europe" published in the journal Economica in 2023, they seek to better understand the role of firms and the impact of public policies on gender equality. Centralized wage bargaining, which allows less discrimination against women, reduces differences within companies, while certain family policies reduce differences between companies. 

Differentiating between intra- and inter-company gaps

According to the results of the study, companies contribute an average of 30% to the pay gap in the European Union, although this varies widely from country to country. Within this 30%, the researchers chose to differentiate between two types of gap. The difference in pay between men and women within the same company is known as the "intra-company" pay gap. It can be reduced through pay negotiations or, at national level, through anti-discrimination policies. The second type of gap is the difference in pay between companies that hire mainly men and those that hire mainly women. This 'inter-company' gap can be reduced by other measures, such as teleworking or family policies encouraging women who have had children to return to work.