The now-defunct Gender Pay Gap Bot on X (formerly Twitter) was my go-to webpage on International Women’s Day (IWD) for a few years. As we know, IWD is an opportunity for companies to advertise or share on social media how supportive and appreciative they are of the women in their workplaces. Anyone could tag the Bot in one of the Tweets (as long as the company was based in the UK), and it would retweet with the company’s gender pay gap: “In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is ___% lower than men’s.” This often led to a storm of reactions and heated discussions.

Take this post from 2022, where Wizz Air tweeted a celebration of their cabin crew. The Bot responded that the pay gap is a whopping 46.8%, and Twitter went wild, with some people tweeting how disgraceful this is and others pointing out that the pay gap question is an absurd simplification.

Like I said, it was great watching. But, of course, a much more significant discussion was triggered: does the gender pay gap actually exist? Especially if you take into account other factors such as industry, seniority, education, and opportunities.

Before we can delve deeper into the problem, it’s key to understand what the term ‘gender pay gap’ actually means. As a standard, the “gender pay gap is defined as the difference between the average gross hourly earnings of men and women expressed as a percentage of the average gross hourly earnings of men” (Statistisches Bundesamt). This is also sometimes referred to as the “unadjusted gender pay gap”, as it does not take into account any additional factors, such as seniority.

The idea behind this arguably oversimplified calculation is to give the bigger picture of the difference between men and women in terms of financial and economic measures. Across the European Union, according to the latest available statistics from 2020, there is a 13% unadjusted pay gap across all Member States (which is a 3.4% improvement from 2012). The gender pay gap varied among the EU Member States, with the highest differences observed in Latvia (22.3%), Estonia (21.1%), Austria (18.9%), and Germany (18.3%), with the smallest in Luxembourg (0.7%), Romania (2.4%), Slovenia (3.1%), and Italy (4.2%). In the US, the unadjusted gender gap in pay has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, with women earning an average of 82% of what men earned in 2022 (as compared to 80% in 2002).

So, if we take these numbers at face value, in Europe, the US, and beyond, we can simply say: the gender pay gap exists and is not a myth. However, as noted, this statistic only captures the financial and economic imbalance across society between genders very broadly (sadly, there are limited statistics for the economics of people who identify outside the gender binary). So, what happens if we start to break the data down or look at it differently? Will we still find a pay gap?

Germany has attempted to dig deeper through further statistical analysis to “adjust” the pay gap data and understand its causes. The most simplistic statistical data point they have pulled is the “gender overall earnings gap”, a difference in gross hourly earnings and the labour market participation of women and men. If we look at this alone, the data is concerning , showing a 39% gap as of 2022. If we look at the hours gap (total number of hours worked), there’s an 18% difference between men and women, while the employment gap (the labour market participation of women and men) stands at only 9%. The German Federal Statistical Office takes a clear stance, stating that “[e]arnings inequality does not only refer to gross hourly earnings. There will be earnings consequences in the medium to long term if people work only part-time or do not participate in economic life at all.”

Similarly, the European Commission has undertaken further statistical analysis to understand the pay gap and highlight four major contributing factors:

1. Sectoral segregation: Nearly a quarter (24%) of the gender pay gap can be attributed to the overrepresentation of women in relatively low-paying sectors, such as care, health, and education. These roles are considered in society more broadly to be ‘feminine roles’, and while they have a highly positive societal impact, they are sadly systematically undervalued from an economic standpoint.
2. Unequal share of paid and unpaid work: Statistically, women work more hours per week than men (think childcare, elderly relative care, household care), but a significant number of these hours are unpaid, a fact that might also affect their career choices.
3. Pay discrimination and the glass ceiling: It’s clear that the higher you are in a company’s hierarchy, the higher your level of pay, and less than one in ten of top companies’ CEOs are women.

Additionally, and very crucially, while we may assume that in many companies in the EU, there is at least gender parity for roles on the same hierarchical level, the largest differences in hourly earnings in the EU were between managers: women have a 23% lower salary than their male counterparts. In other words, women earn less than men for doing equal work or work of equal value, even though the principle of equal pay has been enshrined in the European Treaties (Article 157 TFEU) since 1957.

To the point on sectoral segregation: an argument we’ve heard time and time again is that we all know ‘care roles’ are not as well paid as other sectors, and that if women choose to enter these positions, they shouldn’t complain that their pay is lower. Yes, many women opt to enter the education and care sectors, but it’s important to understand why this is (as well as, to consider why men are perhaps discouraged).

We have deemed the roles of teacher, nurse, air steward, etc. as feminine. Why? Because society has decided women are more caring than men, and these roles should be filled by people who care. There is a much larger societal problem at play, in which from a young age, girls are funnelled into ‘softer’, more ‘creative’ or ‘caring’ subjects at school, while boys are encouraged to take on ‘harder’, more ‘logical’ topics. From a young age, girls see women in care roles and men in business roles, and are socialised to follow suit. Luckily for us, a significant shift is underway,  with pioneering women taking on the roles of entrepreneur, surgeon, aeronautical engineer, and more, inspiring further generations of girls to reconsider their socialisation and understand what they really want to do in the professional world. Similarly, we have more men proudly taking on the roles of nurses and teachers (from 2010-2020, men went from 8% of the nursing workforce to 11%; and teachers from 14-18% in the same period), and more and more men choosing to be stay-at-home fathers (between 2010 and 2020, the percentage of households with stay-at-home fathers increased by about 70% across the EU), highlighting a significant shift in traditional gender roles and showing young boys that this care work is as valuable as high-paying, more traditionally masculine roles.

Connected to this, another factor we hear more about in discussions is the motherhood versus fatherhood Premium. While theoretically the EU promotes an equal sharing of parental leave, pushes for an adequate public provision of childcare services, and demands adequate company policies on flexible working time arrangements, we know that in the vast majority of heterosexual couples, the woman takes more time off and thus takes over more of this unpaid care work.

Again, there is a structural imbalance in the professional sphere. Data shows that a woman’s income after she becomes a mother nosedives and takes more than a decade to return to the same baseline it had been before she got pregnant. Meanwhile, men are more often than not rewarded by employers for becoming fathers. In fact, there is something called the Fatherhood Premium; the data here conversely shows fatherhood is associated with a 3% to 10% pay premium. The reasons for both the decrease and increase in salary are problematic, systemic, and widespread, further contributing to pay inequality across Europe and globally.

See our video: This is why fathers earn more money when having children here

In summary, no matter which way you look at it, the gender pay gap exists. But it’s not simply a case of ensuring women are paid the same rate as men when they do the same jobs. Within society, there are a number of factors that prevent access to equal opportunities, such as our education system and the structure around parental leave. So, while conversations on the topic may feel frustrating, it’s important to keep having them, to push beyond pay parity to understanding how we can fix the larger structural, societal problems until we have created a world in which equal opportunities for men and women truly exist.

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Written by Emily Hoffschmidt-McDonnell, and researched by Rachel Bolte.

See our sources here