The difference between average salary for men and women in Croatia is smaller than in most other EU states.
This year, Icelandic companies with more than 25 employees will need to obtain a certificate proving that women are paid equally to their male counterparts. According to the World Economic Forum, Iceland has been the world leader in the status of female employees for the last ten years, and the authorities have made a decision to completely abolish gender inequality in the next five years, reports Večernji List on January 10, 2018.
Equality between salaries of male and female employees will be checked by competent state institutions every three years, and they will issue a special certificate. Similar controls are present just in Sweden and in Quebec in Canada. Among the EU member states, Estonia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and the United Kingdom are the worst offenders, with pay gender differences of more than 20 percent in favour of men. The Law on Salary Transparency in Germany is a milder version of the Icelandic law because it applies only to companies with 200 and more employees.
With a pay difference of about ten percent, Croatia is among the top 25 percent of EU member states. The smallest difference has been recorded in Luxembourg and Italy – about five percent, followed by Slovenia with eight percent. With ten percent, Croatia is well below the European average of 16 percent.
Danijel Nestić, a researcher at the Institute of Economics, says that it is unacceptable that women are paid less than men for doing similar jobs, adding that income differences appear due to sophisticated processes such as segregation of employment. “Jobs in a warehouse or at a cash register are almost identical with regards to responsibility, but as a rule, the warehouse jobs are better paid,” says Nestić, whose research has confirmed that women in Croatia have about one-tenth lower wages than men, which is mostly the result of the segmentation of jobs. Women dominate sectors with lower pays, such as the textile industry, social sector, public services, education and healthcare, where salaries are lower than in the “male” sectors, such as finances.
In the rankings of the World Economic Forum, which ranks countries according to gender equality status, Croatia is placed considerably worse than Slovenia. It slipped from the 16th position in 2006 to 54th place in 2017.
According to the latest published data, women in 2015 earned an average of 5,305 kuna, while men had 5,951 kuna in monthly net earnings.
Translated from Večernji List.
