Pay and the sexes

A yawning gap

The gap between pay for men and women in Europe

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Readers' comments



I believe this is a reflection of the large proportion of low-end unqualified labor that makes up most of the labor force. You will see less disparity in jobs that require at least some college/university education.

When a girl has no higher education she goes to work in a factory to do some boring piece work or the food industry - typically lowest pay in a country. Or she learns some typing and goes to work as receptionist, administrative assistant etc - better conditions, but still very low pay.

A guy in the same situation has somewhat wider choice of opportunities, including those that require physical labor or involve some risk - and are paid higher even if the qualification required is rather low. I haven't seen many female taxi drivers, construction workers or security guards.

The bottom line is it's not the gender that pays, it's the job. But your gender almost determines your job when you are at the low end of the society.

Paul Deacon from Italy

Men seldom withdraw from the labor market to bring up children. This means the average man has more work experience and training than the average woman. Why should they be paid equally?Equality also means that no one has to pay more for the same amount of utility that they receive. This means, notably, that men, on average, should pay for food no more than women in proportion of their income -- but the difference in body weight means that men have to eat more than women to keep their body in healthy equilibrium, and hence have to buy more food. Men's pay should be higher, then, for men and women to be equal. All the more so because men also need more wool and cotton and a bigger bed than women -- although this last item can be shared by both without any loss in personal satisfaction.


I know it sounds politically correct to have the same wages for men and women, but is it really a rational to have so? The arguments for the equal wages are rather based on "fairness" no matter the real reasons behind the maybe-rational difference (costs, etc).


i live in Belgium. It s a kind of artificial state, having not that many nationals being proud of being a belgian. It s a mix of northern and southern european values. What I do notice, is that is largely forgotten abroad. Even at the economist, it s rarely taken into these kind of statistics. Is that, cause we don t make statistics, or do we speak a boring language that no one understands, or do ten million people not count. ? There is a curious fact though, almost in every ranking, the country scores high, and that s not without a reason.

I really wonder why the country is always ignored. May be cause having no housing bubble, or having no failing health insurance, or no dilapidated roads, or no school drop outs and no ghettos , makes it no story for a journalist

We only get in the news when comment is given on our peculiar political system forever trying to get a balance between the survival and the break up of the state, but then again it s boring, we don t ve street fighting, nor bombs, no IRA or ETA
to keep the world attentive to us.

Am I complaining. Yes of course. I suggest that some serious attention could be given to a political systems that combines extreme individual freedom to a social (some would say socialist) wellfare state, and in which its work force has a productivity far beyond that of other industrialised states.

Now if the economist compares countries on their achievments, it s kind of lazy to pick the easy languages and the big countries and the simple systems

Radio Waver

"Equal pay for equal work"? How about "proportional pay for proportional work"?Has anyone thought maybe the pay gap is because the work isn't equal? Don't you think employers would pay top dollar (euro) for their top performers? How about this, what is the gap between the top 30% of men vs the bottom 30% of men? There's nobody fighting for more pay for the bottom 30% of men. I bet their pay gap is even bigger! And I bet it's entirely due to performance. And I bet more men feel they can't remove themselves from the statistic by staying home and taking care of children.


Discrimination can only can only be stamped out by market forces in a perfect competition world. Thats far from real life. Germany is full of quasi monopolist and oligopols.


For the older generations, old fashioned discrimination is definitly a major cause of the income gap.


I expect the German gap to close soon. We have a new problem here: In the younger generations, man are the endagered species with the worse average formal education.

B. Schaaf

To believe that these pay gaps exist for purely discriminitory reasons requires that one believe that employers would forgo a 15% cost savings simply to hire men instead of women.


This kind of comparison is simplistic. Why not also look at how many women prefer to work less hours and have lower wages, for reasons like spending more time with their family? This topic is always presented like an example of discrimination, but most often is a choice that should be respected as such. And from a different perspective: I find it ridiculous that prizes in sports, like tennis, are set to be the same for women and men competitions in spite of a clear difference in the quality of the entertainment.


I've been in a couple of countries in europe and i can tell that men and women earn the same until women decide to leave their job to have babies. That's the point. There is no dicrimination or anything and people should stop debating again and again on this issue. It is not like racial discrimination at work, it is about life choices.

You women decide : Being a Condoleezza Rice or being an Octomon. You usually choose somewhere between.


I'd be curious to see if there is a correlation between maternity benefits and pay differentials. I would guess so. The higher the maternity benefits, the higher the pay gap to make up for this. Just a thought, but I will probably get the Summers treatment for even suggesting it though...

Pete and Karen Kinsberg

Anthony Probus wrote that the discrepancies are due to the fact that men are more attracted to technical careers which pay more. As a female professional engineer, I'd like to point out that the discrepancies exist between the genders in the same careers. My professional association annually publishes a salary survey and the 2008 results show a 25% gap between men and women, in the same technical field. I find that number very discouraging.


xPeru, why stop at 6:30 AM to 8:00 PM? Why not 24 hours a day? Newborns can be directly transferred to government ownership. Citizens can be trained from birth to be loyal, obedient workers and consumers. No more energy wasted on obsolete culture and messy social disharmony and conflict. As an added bonus, in the absence of any parenting, marriage and monogamy could also be done away with. Without any family life, the female prole population will be available to gratify the sexual appetites of the mostly male technocratic overclass.


Anthony,These sorts of studies are usually designed to account for those kind of discrepancies, and given the explanation of the chart above I get the impression that they've done so here (at least, I hope to God). If not then I agree with you completely.

Anthony Probus

Men are more attracted to careers that have a lot to do with mathematics or engineering, and are consequently paid more. Simple as that.

Why don't the researchers stop insulting our intelligence and make comparisons that are actually meaningful, such as the equality of pay between sexes for the same job done?

Ragnar Ský


This is what has been done in Sweden. High taxes, "free day care" with more or less the pickup times you suggest, and still Sweden has not achieved income equality, as defined by this article.

Maybe people don't want to be controlled by the state? At least, one could hope that is the answer to the Swedish riddle.



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