Nowadays, finding
a job in Belgium is not a piece of cake, especially for women. Employers are
not keen on hiring them because they do not want to give them a maternity leave
when they decide to have children or because they simply underestimate their
skills. And when they do find a job, women are not allowed the same income as
their male colleagues. This blog post is going to analyze the case of the
gender pay gap in Belgium but we will see that, sadly, this kind of
discrimination is present all over the world.
In Belgium,
women are on average paid 10.2% less than men for the exact same work. This
percentage is calculated comparing the salary of men and women who are working
for the exact same amount of hours. If we compare the monthly salary of Belgian
men and women, the gap increases to 21% because a lot of women only work
part-time. 45.8% of Belgian women work part-time, sometimes they want to
combine work with their family life, but sometimes they did not choose not to
work full-time. The average pay gap between men and women in Europe is 16.2%.
Every year,
the Global Gender Gap Index releases a chart ranking 142 countries of the world
according to their score concerning the gender pay gap issue. The score is a
number between 0 and 1. 0 corresponds to inequality between men and women’s
salary and 1 corresponds to equality between both salaries.
 |
| http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2014/rankings/ |
As you can
see from the chart, sadly no country reaches the score of 1, meaning that there
is not one single country on this planet that offers the same amount of money
to a woman working for the same job as a man. The countries with the highest
scores are the Scandinavians countries, with at least 0.8/1. Belgium is ranked
number 10, with a score of 0.7809/1, which is not too bad considering the 142
countries included in this chart. Italy is ranked number 69 with a score of 0.6973/1.
The countries at the very bottom of this chart are Syria, Chad, Pakistan and
Yemen with a very poor score of only 0.5/1 which means that in these countries,
men are paid twice as much as women.
Since 1957,
the Belgian law stipulates that men and women must have the same salary for the
same work. However, many companies have found a way to avoid abiding by this
rule. They give different names to two functions so that they have a valid reason
to pay the male employee more than the female employee. The two functions are
called differently but everyone knows that the jobs are exactly the same.
Belgium is actually the first country of the European
Union that has organized the Equal Pay Day, in 2005. The Equal Pay Day consists
in raising people’s awareness about the gender pay gap. It was initially created
in the United States in 1990. The date on which the Equal Pay Date is held is
calculated in a very precise way: we calculate the date until which a woman
should work in order to earn the same salary as a man who works from the 1st of January until the 31st
of December. The Equal Pay Day usually takes place in March. In 2014, the
Belgian Equal Pay Day took place on the 18th of March, this means
that a woman should work exactly 14 months and 18 days to earn the very same
amount of money that a man would have earned in 12 months. In other words, a woman would work two months and eighteen days for nothing.
Here is the link to 2 videos, created for the Equal Pay Day, whose
aim is to raise awareness about the gender pay gap: http://www.equalpayday.be/EN/
Sources:
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento