Worldwide gender pay gap is stuck at 16 per cent says ITUC

On the eve of International Womenís Day, a new report from the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), reveals that on average, women around the world are paid 16 per cent less than their male work colleagues.

The report, The Global Gender Pay Gap, www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/gap-1.pdf includes detailed analysis of statistics from official sources in 63 countries around the world*. Data from an online salary survey covering more than 400,000 workers in 12 countries is also included in the new study**.

Some of the findings from The Global Gender Pay Gap include:

more educated women often find themselves on the wrong side of an even bigger pay gap compared to men with a similar educational background;

international competition due to globalisation appears in some cases to be narrowing the gap, but this is due more to downward pressure on menís wages than to increased income for women;

while the gap is slowly narrowing in some countries, it is not changing and is even increasing in others; and,

information on incomes is not available for hundreds of millions of people in informal and unprotected work, mainly in developing countries, leaving a massive deficit in the global knowledge base.

Commenting on the report, TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: ìFifty-five years after the ILO convention on equal pay was introduced, women around the globe are still being paid less than their male work colleagues. This persistent global gender pay gap is causing widespread poverty, damaging family health and stunting economic growth.î

Commenting on the report, ITUC President Sharan Burrow said: ìDespite decades of anti-discrimination legislation and changes in company rhetoric, the pay packets of women, whether they are in New York or Shanghai, are still significantly thinner than those of men. The positive news for workers around the world is that unions are succeeding in bridging the pay divide, as the data in this report confirms. Through collective bargaining, women and men get a better and more equal deal.

ìThrough our campaigns for equality and other workers rights, unions are playing a vital role in educating and informing workers about gender pay issues, in the face of strong resistance from some governments and employers. We are resolved to continue and strengthen this work, to ensure that women in all corners of the world, employed across different industries and performing hundreds of different jobs, can achieve equal pay.î

The report says that unions in a number of countries are calling into question the basis for national pay statistics, pointing to larger real pay gaps between men and women than the official figures show. Differences in the criteria for collecting and analysing data, or the absence of jobs such as domestic work in the statistics, can also lead to under-estimation of the real gap, says the report.

* The report was prepared for the ITUC by the UK-based pay specialists Incomes Data Services www.incomesdata.co.uk

** The online survey results are from the WageIndicator Foundation www.wageindicator.org