EU Targets Binding Gender-Gap Pay Transparency Rules by Year-End

(Bloomberg) --

The European Union plans to expose how much less some companies are paying women under draft rules to be unveiled later this year, the EU's equality chief said.

EU Equality Commissioner Helena Dalli hopes to tackle the wage gap by requiring companies to report on how much they pay men and women, she said Thursday. Women in the 27-nation bloc are paid 16% less than men and receive pensions that are 30% lower on average.

The information could help women to negotiate higher wages, researchers say. Regulators are now seeking feedback from groups including employers and trade unions to feed into a detailed proposal by the end of 2020.

Bosses should welcome pay transparency because female workers “are not going to be proud working for a company which is not paying them as much as their male counterparts,” Dalli told reporters at a Wednesday briefing.

“If you know that that your women employees are aware that they are being shortchanged, will they be as productive as they are expected to be?” she asked. “Would they be happy at the place of work?”

Sweden, Austria, Denmark and Finland already gather data on gender pay differences which has helped raise some wages.

The U.K., which left the EU at the end of January, requires companies with at least 250 employees to disclose the difference between men's and women's mean pay, triggering legal action from female journalists at the British Broadcasting Corp. who were paid less than men for similar work.

Mastercard Inc. and Citigroup Inc. are among the relatively few firms choosing to disclose how much they pay male and female workers.

Dalli warned that results aren't likely to be immediate as “we are changing the foundation of how we operate as societies.” She also plans to revive a stalled EU proposal that would mandate companies to appoint women to at least 40% of board member posts and ensure EU nations enforce rules on work-life balance.

Only 7% of chief executive officers in the EU are female, with women taking just 17% of executive posts. Women managers earn 10 euros less than men per hour, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality.

To contact the reporter on this story: Aoife White in Brussels at awhite62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net, Peter Chapman, John Ainger

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