Paloma H. Matellano Madrid
Madrid
Updated Friday, February 16, 2024-23:13
Regulation The collapse of unions to negotiate equality plans will be aggravated by the new mobility plans
Work The Government launches a statistic to praise employers and unions: 92% of workers are covered by an agreement
In 2022, the annual salary of women in Spain was
20% lower
than that of men, a gap equivalent to them working
73 days a year for free
, almost
two and a half months
. The gender difference in remuneration rebounded in 2022 after four consecutive years of decline, although the improvement compared to the past remains substantial: the salary gap in 2017 was equivalent to women having worked for free for 82 days. This has been denounced by
CSIF
, the majority union of public employees, in a report prepared with data from the
Active Population Survey (EPA)
and the
Tax Agency
.
The difference between the annual remuneration of men and women is
smaller among the youngest
, reaching its minimum value in the age group between 26 and 35 years old, where women earn 12% less than them. On the contrary, women between 46 and 65 years old receive a salary 22.5% lower than that of men of the same age, the equivalent of them working 82 days a year for free. The most pronounced inequalities occur at the extremes: working minors earn 27% less than their counterparts and employees over 65 years of age receive a salary 38% lower than their counterparts.
In the
Public Administration
there are also salary differences between men and women, although these are less pronounced than in the private sector, since female civil servants
earn an annual salary that is 8.5% lower than that of men
. The magnitude of inequality becomes even more evident when analyzing remuneration per hour worked: for the same 60 minutes of employment, the Public Administration
pays women between 1 and 1.5 euros less
than men.
Thus, CSIF denounced on Friday in the presentation of the report that the situation among civil servants, although "it should be exemplary for the entire labor market", shows important signs of inequality with, for example, double the number
of temporary contracts for women. than to men
. In the Public Administration there are more than 700,000 women hired on a temporary basis.
The union asked the Government to "get its act together" because it considers that it is
failing to comply with regulations
in the public sphere by not having equality plans and the salary audit required by the Organic Law of Equality and two Royal Decrees. CSIF denounced that this regulation is not being complied with in the autonomous communities or in the city councils, where on multiple occasions "unjustified salary inequalities occur in concepts such as the specific complement, productivity or horizontal professional career."
They resign to reconcile
The gender gap in employment is not only manifested in terms of wages, but also in terms of employment and unemployment.
Six out of every 10 people who are unemployed are women
and, although general unemployment figures have improved in the last five years, the gender gap in this regard has barely changed. Even more striking is the difference in the unemployment statistics that occurs within Spanish marriages: of all the married people in the country, the number of unemployed women is close to double that of men.
That the gender gap in the number of unemployed is greater among married people than in the overall population could be related to the unequal division of care, as is the length of the working day. In 2023,
93% of employees who worked part-time to be able to reconcile were women
, a total of 352,400 in Spain. Thus, for every twelve women who give up full-time employment to care for family members, there is only one man.
Likewise, of the almost 55,000 leaves requested to care for children or dependent people in 2023,
84%
corresponded to women. With this, while men work on average about 34 hours a week, women do not reach 30, which causes them to have lower remuneration and contributes to increasing the gender wage gap.