Women in the European Union get paid 13 per cent less than men doing the same job on average despite equal pay being part of EU law, the European Commission said on Tuesday.
“Equal pay for the same work or work of equal value is one of the founding principles of the EU. It was laid down in the Treaty of Rome in 1957,” the Commission said in a statement.
“Yet progress on the elimination of the gender pay gap is stagnant this year and has been slow over the years,” it said.
To help address the problem, the Commission issued a Pay Transparency Directive that entered into force in early June.
The directive, an EU law, sets a framework for how to apply the idea of “work of equal value” and comparison criteria that include skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions.
The directive is aimed at helping workers identify pay discrimination and challenge it. But it has yet to be transposed into national law by the EU’s 27 countries which have three years to do that.