Experts decry 25% “gender pay gap” between Czech women, Czech men
World Equal Pay Day was marked for the first time in the Czech Republic on Thursday, with successful businesswomen among those attending events to draw attention to the gap in salaries between women and men. Statistics suggest the gender pay gap in this country is around 25% - i.e. on average Czech women earn one quarter less than Czech men. Earlier we spoke to Petr Pavlík, associate professor of gender studies at Charles University, and asked him more about the gender pay gap.
“I would say it’s dramatic in comparison with several advanced countries of the European Union, especially Scandinavian countries, which have the lowest pay gap between men and women.”
And what explains the marked difference with those countries and the Czech Republic?
“The main reason is that in Scandinavia they’ve been doing something about it for almost 30 years. They’ve targeted efforts to lower the gap. They have policies. They follow the policies and they do things which improve the gap, which is connected to many factors. The two main ones are vertical segregation, which means that men are usually in the top positions with the highest salaries, and horizontal segregation, which means that women are in jobs and occupations which are associated with femininity, and they are on average paid less than in the occupations and jobs and sectors where men prevail.”
Is that such a bad thing though? Women perform different functions in society than men, so surely one would expect that on average, they would earn less.
“Why would you expect that? If the work of women was valued as much as the work of men, you wouldn’t see the differences. This implies that the work of women is somehow less valuable than the work of men.”
Or perhaps it’s because women go on maternity leave, women spend more time staying at home looking after the children, and less time advancing their careers. Doesn’t that also explain the gap?
“But why should this disadvantage women? Why don’t we have policies that don’t work to the disadvantage of women just because they go on maternity leave? Why don’t men participate more in taking care of the kids, taking care of the family etc? Why do we have policies which put men in more advantageous positions with respect to salaries? Which of course then means that if a man and a woman get divorced, the man walks away with a high salary, and the woman is left – usually with the kids – with a lower salary, and less qualifications. So you know, it’s a question of policies, it’s a question of how you think about equality, and what you think is fair. And I think this is not fair.”
“You can safely say that they don’t pay any attention to this problem. They don’t care. Nobody cares. There are no policies which would try to do something about the gender pay gap. Actually, we have policies that try to hide the gender pay gap. The Czech Statistics Office has a long-term strategy of trying to hide the gap by publishing the gap in medians of salaries, not in average salaries, which makes the gender pay gap seem several percent smaller than it actually is.”
