WOMEN employed in the European Union are still earning 13 per cent on average less than their male counterparts, the European Commission said on Tuesday.

“This means that for every euro a man earns, a women will make only 87 cents,” the commission said in a statement.

Looked at another way, women have to work more days in a year to attain the same annual salary level as a man.

That is why Wednesday, Nov 15, is marked down as this year’s symbolic “Equal Pay Day”, representing the date from which “women must work until the end of the year to earn what men earned in the same year”.

“Equal Pay Day serves to remind us to continue our efforts to close the gender pay gap,” the EU commissioner for values, Vera Jourova and the commissioner for equality, Helena Dalli, said in the statement.

“Equal pay for the same work or work of equal value is one of the founding principles of the EU.”

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They both noted that the 2023 gender pay gap is more or less the same as for the previous two years.

The European Union’s 27 member states adopted a law this year designed to close that gap, but several countries have yet to incorporate the directive in their national statutes. AFP