In 2022, a woman has to work until February 21 to have earnings similar to those of a man for 2021, according to the calculations done based on data of the National Bureau of Statistics concerning the pays of women and men, IPN reports.
Equal Pay Day that is celebrated in Moldova today signifies the number of days that a woman needs to work to earn as much as a man earned the previous year.
According to the Center “Partnership for Development” (CPD), the gender pay gap in 2021 decreased slightly compared with a year before. Even so, the general tendency is clear: the pay gap widened constantly the past decade, from 12.2% in 2011 to 13.7% in 2020. The pay gap would have been higher if the informal pays, which are much larger among men, had been taken into account. In monetary terms, the annual financial loss of women was 19,063 lei in 2021.
In well-paid areas, the pay gap is even wider. The gender gap in pay constituted 50% in printing activities, 44% in the financial sector, 38% in the IT sector. The gender pay gap persists even if there are more women with higher education than men on the labor market. This inequality can be due to the fact that the women are underestimated in top management bodies and hold rather executive posts that are paid worse.
The pay gap calculations in Moldova are based on the National Bureau of Statistics’ data concerning the average salaries of women and men. The estimated difference is therefore an average value. Currently, there are no data about the exact difference in the pays of the women and men who do the same job. Realizing the limits of the calculations, the CPD in 2020 carried out an econometric analysis of the gender gap in pay in a bid to identify the objective factors that are behind this discrepancy. The analyzed data show the pays of men are on average by 25% higher than the pays of women. The explained (objective) side represents only 8.7 percentage points. The remaining 16.7 percentage points cannot be explained.
The pay gap in the long run determines inequalities when an old-age pension is set. In monetary terms, the annual financial loss of a retired woman is significant, being of 5872 lei on average.
