French women face 1,000 year wait for equal pay, warn trade unions

Unions called on Ursula von der Leyen, the president of European Commission, to bring forward binding rules on pay transparency. 

Credit: AP

French women face a wait of more than 1,000 years before they get equal pay at current rates of change, trade unions have warned. 

British women will have to endure 58 more years of the gender pay gap, until 2078. Germans will have to wait until next century until 2121, 43 years after the UK. 

The pay gap is getting bigger in nine EU countries, including Ireland, Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia, research by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) found.

Romania should eliminate the gender gap by 2022, the first EU country to do so if current trends continue. Belgium should follow with pay equality in 2028. 

But the salary gap is narrowing so slowly in France, at a rate of just 0.1 per cent since 2010, that French women are on course for at least a thousand-year wait. 

The French pay gap was 15.6 per cent in 2010. By 2018, it was 15.5 per cent. In the UK it was 23.3 per cent in 2010 and 19.9 per cent in 2018. 

Women — Gender Pay Gap

On current trends, 11 EU member states will eliminate the gap before Britain, including Greece, Hungary, The Netherlands, Austria and the Scandanavian countries.  

Without action from European and national lawmakers, the gender pay gap will not be eliminated across the remaining 27 EU member states until 2104 in the next century, the unions said. If Britain had not left the EU, that would have been achieved by 2102.

Data from Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, showed that the gender pay gap closed by just 1 percent over the last eight years across the whole bloc, which means women will be waiting for another 84 years if current trends continue.

ETUC called on Ursula von der Leyen, the first woman to be the president of the European Commission, to prioritise EU legislation that would enforce pay transparency. 

Mrs von der Leyen has won plaudits for achieving near gender balance among her commissioners but the unions said they were concerned her promise to propose legislation within 100 days of her appointment was slipping. 

ETUC deputy general secretary Esther Lynch said: “Big business likes to pretend that we’re making good progress in reducing the gender pay gap through voluntary measures. 

“But women would be waiting over 100 years for equal pay in Europe if change continues at its current pace. “