As gender pay gap in Lithuania persists, companies from now on will have to publicly disclose the average salaries they are paying their male and female employees.
According to the European Commission's 2020 factsheet, working women in Lithuania make 86 cents on every euro paid to men.
Read more: Lithuania's gender equality progress ‘shamefully slow’ – president
In order to address the issue and encourage change, Lithuania's firms, which are already required to disclose the average salary paid to their employees, will have to separate the data into male and female components starting in April.
“We will be able to see differences among sectors, identify the outliers where we might need additional regulation or action, educational campaigns,” says MP Mindaugas Lingė, the chair of the parliamentary Social Affairs Committee.
Employer organisations, however, are critical of the measure, saying averages can be deceiving. They often cover differences in skill and responsibility levels and other “objective reasons”.
“For example, women might go on maternity leave, while men continue in the job and their pay rises during the time that women spend at home raising kids. After that, women return to work and to their previous salary,” says Eglė Radišauskienė, the director of the Lithuanian Business Confederation.
“There are many factors that determine pay,” she adds, insisting that employers do not purposefully discriminate against female employees.
However, the pay gap can often be the result of unequal negotiating positions, according to Lithuania's Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson's Office. More transparency may help address the issue.
“A woman can be working all her life without really knowing that she's being discriminated against. Because salaries are secret in the company,” says the Office's spokesman Donatas Paulauskas.
According to him, The Equal Opportunities Ombudsperson receives very few complaints over pay discrimination – simply because people do not know how much their colleagues are making for the same work.
Read more: Lithuania moves up one notch in EU's gender equality index
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
