The global gender pay gap remains high despite decades of commitments and can only be closed through coordinated action and deliberate policies, a new publication from the International Labour Organization (ILO) finds.
The report, titled Pay Equity: A Comprehensive Response to the Gender Pay Gap, proposes a new Theory of Change and Intervention Model based on coordinated actions and deliberate policies aimed at delivering real change in women's pay and working lives. The findings show that laws and institutions, wage policies, pay transparency, objective job evaluation, social dialogue, labour inspection, social protection, care policies, and actions are essential to tackling gender stereotypes and reducing the gender pay gap.
Globally, women in wage employment still earn on average 20 per cent less than men, with even wider gaps for women with children, women in informal work, women with disabilities, and migrant women. At the same time, powerful transformations - from digitalization and artificial intelligence to demographic change and rising care needs - are reshaping labour markets, with the potential to either widen inequalities or help close them.
Building on the ILO's 2013 Equal Pay Guide, the new publication sets out a comprehensive "whole-of-society" approach to achieving equal pay for work of equal value.
The guide captures changes in the policy landscape since 2013 and covers the rapid expansion of pay transparency laws, new tools for objective job evaluation, the growing role of technology, and stronger links between pay equity, minimum and living wage policies. It adopts a life-course perspective, showing how unpaid care work, career breaks, and part-time work accumulate into lower pay and a gender pension gap. It also places greater emphasis on informal work and intersecting forms of discrimination.
The guide - available in multiple languages - is aimed primarily at governments, employers' organizations and workers' organizations. It also speaks to a wider audience. By combining data, legal analysis, policy guidance and "snapshots of practice" from countries around the world, it is a useful reference and manual for change for broader audiences.
Towards Pay Equity grew out of the work of the Equal Pay International Coalition (EPIC), the global multi-stakeholder initiative coordinated by the ILO, OECD and UN Women. Many of the most up-to-date good practices highlighted in the guide come from EPIC members, who shared concrete examples of laws, pay transparency measures, job evaluation tools and wage policies that are already making a difference.
A call to immediate action
Towards Pay Equity is also a call to action for stronger global commitments, new policy tools and growing public attention, so that the right conditions are put in place for pay equity to be achieved. The guide also makes clear that equal pay for work of equal value is both a fundamental principle and right at work and an economic and social necessity, that benefits everyone.
The guide was developed with the generous support of the French Government, Ministry of Labour, Health, Solidarity and Families, under the France-ILO Partnership.
