PES Manifesto

Martina Preuss: Equal Pay Day - women have less in their pockets

Publié vendredi 11 avril 2008 à 16h35
par martina (vu 1480 fois et 6 commentaires)

According to Eurostat a woman in Europe earns, in average, 15 percent less than her male colleague. With 22 percent difference Germany takes a sad lead when it comes to pay inequality – on the management level it is even worse (33 percent). Only a few countries have taken action against this inequity.

The purpose of the international action day for equal opportunities and equal pay, which has already taken place in the US and Belgium, is to create awareness of this problem – and soon there will also be actions in Germany. The German Network of Business and Professional Women has taken the initiative for the Equal Pay Day on 15 April 2008 where the network, together with many other women’s organizations, will organize numerous actions.

One of the activities of the German Equal Pay Day will be ‘Red Bag’ – which was already put into practice last summer in connection with the European year of equal opportunities. At that time the initiative went rather unnoticed by the general public - I don’t remember having heard about it before now.

Every woman can take part in the ‘Red Bag’ action – even if her limited time does not allow her to participate in other activities of the Equal Pay Day: On 15 April women are encouraged to bring a red bag when they are in the street, on their way to work or to the supermarket, to bring attention to pay inequality!

However, one day of action is not enough. We need to make a continuous effort to bring attention to this type of discrimination and to change people’s minds. The pay gap does not only affect the ‘here and now’, the individual situation of the woman concerned, but also has a great impact on the wider society: women who earn less pay less to the social security system – still women live longer and receives pensions for a longer time than their male colleagues. Equal pay would have a positive impact on the economy, and that’s why I ask myself: why hasn’t equal pay for equal work been put into practice a long time ago?

Have our governments and politicians been a sleep? Every year the European Commission presents a new and detailed work programme and even a European Institute for Gender Equality has been established. Still, I read in this year’s Commission report on ‘Equality between women and men’ that “the capacity to analyze the phenomenon, which remains complex and poorly understood” still needs to be improved. This really makes it obvious that the current situation is not satisfactory.

Therefore, we still need to go on the street or on the Internet to show our support for resolving these serious equality issues.

Find a German-language version of this post attached or read it on Parteiblog.

Tags: blogueur de la semaine, égalité, femmes, travailleurs

Dossier: Equal Pay Day_DE.pdf