Gender pay gap is decreasing but women still earn less

Despite registering a decrease in the gender pay gap since 2013, Portuguese female workers still earn less 18.2% than their male colleagues. This data was released by the new barometer to measure gender pay inequalities, presented this Thursday, to whose version ECO had early access.

In this first edition of this barometer, the income of 2,873,467 employees from 290,323 companies from across the country was used to establish comparisons.

Generally speaking, 48% of the dependent workers are women, meaning that 1.4M women worker for an employer rather than for themselves. Regarding income disparities (gross income in normal and extraordinary periods), the barometer showed that women earn less 18.2% than men, For example, a man earns on average 1,233.59€ per month, while a woman earns just 1,009.33€.

However, if one takes a closer look at the average base gross income (earned regularly), the gap is slightly smaller, corresponding to 14.8%. According to this indicator, a woman earns on average 859.12 euros while a man earns 1,008.76 euros, monthly.

It is important to highlight the fact these numbers are the lowest ever since 2010 – the year of the first public report of this kind on the gender pay gap – when the pay gap for average income was 20%.

Surprisingly, the barometer finds the least gender pay inequality in small companies (with less than 50 employees): 13%. Medium-sized companies, though, are the ones showing the highest gender pay gap for average gross income, 22%. Big companies are currently presenting a 16.4% gender pay gap.

The Public Sector, namely Defence, is registering the lowest pay difference between women and men: 8.9%. Geographically, Setúbal’s region presents the highest gender pay gap in the country (24.9%) while Bragança is closer to a full gender pay equality (5.8%).