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Norwegian, Danish women 'stop being paid' in November due to salary gap: report

The Local Denmark
The Local Denmark - [email protected]
Norwegian, Danish women 'stop being paid' in November due to salary gap: report
Norwegian women demonstrate for equal pay on International Women’s Day on March 8th 2017. Photo: Berit Roald / NTB scanpix

An analysis has aimed to demonstrate Europe’s gender pay gap by showing the date that women effectively stop being paid due to average salary differences compared to men.

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For women in both Norway and Denmark, that date is November 6th. 

Business price comparison firm Expert Market analysed the day-to-day effects of the gender pay gap, finding that women in Europe effectively work for free for 2-3 months of the year because of the difference in pay between the sexes.

Using the most up to date gender pay gap statistics from Eurostat, the report calculates how much unpaid time the gender pay gap in each European country equates to, and so determines the date that women effectively start working for free each year.

Women in Denmark and Norway earn 15.1 and 14.9 percent less than their male counterparts’ annual salaries, putting the date at which women effectively stop being paid in both countries at November 6th – just a few days from now.

Those figures place Denmark in 15th and Norway in 17th place of the 31 countries measured in terms of the size of their gender pay gap.

The research reveals that Estonia is the country with the biggest gender pay gap. Women in Estonia effectively stopped being paid on September 23rd, according to the report.

Though the gender pay gap of Estonians has improved from 30 percent last year to 27 percent this year, there is still a substantial gap to close.

At the other end of the spectrum, Italy and Luxembourg have the smallest gender pay gaps of all the countries in the study. The five percent gap equates to women in these countries working for free from the 13th December. Though this is the best result in the study, it still means that women in Italy and Luxembourg work for free for over two weeks.

The UK’s gender pay gap also came under scrutiny as a result of the research. The study found that the gender pay gap in Britain (21 percent) is still worse than the European average (17 percent). Women in the UK stop being paid on October 15th, whereas the average cut off date for Europe is October 30th.

This shows that women in the UK work unpaid for two weeks longer than the European average and overall, work for free for two and a half months of the year.

““This study brings the far reaching effects of the gender pay gap into clear focus. It is absolutely astonishing that in the 21st century women are still suffering such financial penalties merely because of their gender. I hope this report encourages women across Europe to continue to campaign for gender equality in the workplace and in society as a whole,” researcher Jessica Laporte of Expert Market said. 

READ ALSO: Denmark far behind Nordic neighbours on gender equality


Graphic: Expert Market

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