Women who do vocational training receive an average of 7 percent higher training allowances than men.

And women who work a mini-job earn slightly higher hourly wages on average than men with mini-jobs.

However, this does not change the fact that, on average, men bring home more wages than women across all activities and professions.

An evaluation by the Federal Statistical Office for 2022 published on Monday puts the so-called unadjusted wage gap (“gender pay gap”) at 18 percent.

Dietrich Creutzburg

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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However, this average difference has also become smaller in recent years: in 2006, the authority determined an unadjusted “gap” of 23 percent, and in 2019 it fell below 20 percent for the first time.

The current evaluation cannot be compared directly with it, because the survey method had changed somewhat, the statisticians said.

However, this new method captures highly paid, often male-dominated jobs more than before - which would have increased the measured gap with otherwise the same data.

The gap is described as “unadjusted” because it ignores differences in employment structures.

It therefore says little about wage discrimination.

For example, significantly more women than men work mini-jobs (“mini-jobs”);

For this reason alone, when looking at all forms of employment, men earn more on average than women.

And this would be the case - with different mini-job quotas - even if the same work was paid the same without exception.

Structural effects are not very easy to isolate

Different career choices, qualifications and work experience are other factors behind the measured 18 percent gap.

Appropriate data are not available for all relevant structural factors.

As far as these are available, however, they can be calculated out statistically.

In this way, the Federal Office also determines a gap of 7 percent that has been adjusted in this respect.

At the same time, the new evaluation provides a wide range of information on the size of the unadjusted gap in individual economic and activity sectors.

In terms of training allowances, for example, it shows an average of 6.82 euros per hour for women and 6.38 euros for men;

for mini-jobs it is 12.55 euros for women and 12.50 euros for men.

In contrast, the category of highly complex activities is completely different: the men working there earn an average of 40.04 euros per hour, women 30.85 euros.

This could perhaps have something to do with different lengths of professional experience, perhaps also with a high proportion of men in management positions or other factors;

The evaluation does not provide any concrete information on this.

However, it provides further comparisons, such as this one: In the group of employees with fixed-term employment contracts, the unadjusted wage gap is only 3 percent;

but 19 percent among permanent employees.

Collective agreements, on the other hand, apparently hardly affect the size of this wage gap: whether with or without a collective agreement - in both cases men earned an average of 18 percent more wages than women.