Salary differences due to “qualifications, skills, merit and confidence”, says CIP
CIP, Portugal’s main business group has hit back against accusations of gender discrimination in pay – saying it’s not a question of wage discrimination but ‘wage differentiation’.
The issue follows publication of the latest data (from 2022) from Portugal’s Commission for Equality in Labour and Employment (CITE), indicating that the pay gap between women and men was 13.2%: in other words, “women earned €160 euros less than men” that year. Taking into account regular bonuses and allowances, “this difference increased to 16%, or €235 less per month,” said CITE, whose president Carla Tavares warns that the wage gap has effectively increased between men and women for the first time in nine years.
But CIP, the Portuguese business confederation, believes these differences can be justified on the basis of “the assessment that companies make regarding the qualifications, skills, merit and confidence” of employees.
Marking ‘National Equal Pay Day’ today, CIP’s director general Rafael Rocha says in a statement that the confederation “believes that existing wage differences, whether between men and women or within the same gender, can only be justified on the basis of the assessment that companies make of the qualifications, skills, merit and confidence of their employees, as well as their added value to the organisation, and not on the basis of gender.”
Despite signalling that CIP “values equal pay for men and women” as well as “pursuing pragmatic and balanced policies aimed at promoting gender equality,” Rocha argues that it is necessary to “clarify concepts” used.
“In fact, in practice, what we see is that when a pay gap between men and women is identified, it is often labelled as discrimination, even by people with responsibilities”, but this description “is not correct in most cases“, since in “many cases” we are talking about “wage differentiation and not wage discrimination.
“These are two very different realities (…) there can be differentiation without discrimination”.
Thus CIP is calling for a study to be carried out “analysing the differences in salaries by cross-referencing qualifications, education, gender and age, all with the jobs actually performed.
“Only by cross-referencing the variables identified will it be possible to obtain a credible picture of what is actually happening in the labour market,” says the statement.
CITE’s findings nonetheless appear to perpetuate into retirement.
Says Lusa today “an analysis included in the Green Paper on the Sustainability of the Social Security System, which is out for public consultation, reveals that men’s pensions correspond, on average, over the four years analysed, to 73.5% of their final salaries, while for women this rate drops to 58.1%, a difference of 15 percentage points” – and this cannot be explained away by “qualifications, skills, merit and confidence”.
According to Carla Tavares, CITE will be embarking on a new campaign for 2025, involving the sharing of domestic chores and work within the family, as it is here “that all the inequalities lie”.
Source: LUSA
