by Natalie Donback

Spain has managed to close its gender pay gap by ten percentage points over the course of a decade. Policies such as salary transparency, raising the minimum wage and making it mandatory for employers to publish gender equality strategies have all helped narrow the gap, which according to Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, dropped from 18.7% in 2012 to 8.7% in 2022. The southern European country has performed much better than the EU average, which saw the overall pay gap drop from 16.4% to 12.7% in the same period. In other words, Spain has gone from being one of the worst offenders in Europe to one of its best performers.

A major factor in this success is the fact that minimum wage in Spain has been raised from €735 a month in 2018 to €1080 in 2023 – a 47% increase that mostly benefits women, who make up the majority of workers earning minimum wage. Demographic changes have also had an impact, with many older women retiring and highly educated young women entering the job market straight into more high-paid positions – 54% of Spain’s young women have a higher education qualification compared to 45% of young men.

The feminist movement has been instrumental in raising awareness about pay inequality, including during International Women’s Day marches, which last year drew 30,000 participants in Madrid and 40,000 in Barcelona.

“After gender-based violence, inequality at work is probably the second biggest issue,” said Yolanda Besteiro, the President of the Federation of Progressive Women, a non-profit representing women-led organizations. Feminist organizations have also collaborated with the country’s main unions to push for mandatory policies to be implemented in companies and negotiated in collective bargaining agreements, she explained.

Photo: J.M. Grimaldi / Junta de Andalucía CC BY-SA 2.0

Other key policy changes include the passing of two new laws in 2020 which made it mandatory for employers with more than 50 staff to implement a gender equality plan, something that was previously only required of larger companies with more than 250 employees. The plans are negotiated together with the workers or their unions and audits of public, gender-disaggregated salary data are meant to ensure they are being implemented.

“The fundamental role of unions is to analyse the salary data and to negotiate with the employer to see where the issues are and what actions can be taken to resolve them,” said Eva Fernández Urbón, the National Secretary for Equality at CSIF, an independent union that represents many of Spain’s public servants.

But CSIF disagrees with the rosy Eurostat figures, arguing that the current gender pay gap remains as high as 19,89%, while the Spanish Ministry of Equality put it at 15,7% in 2022. The differences come down to how the gap is measured. Eurostat uses the “unadjusted” pay gap – that is, the average pay per hour for women vs men. If the gap is adjusted to account for annual median salary, it widens as women are more likely to work part-time.

“The overload of care that falls on women translates into large injustices, and one of the biggest ones is the pay gap,” Fernández said, noting that 75% of part-time contracts are held by women who need to juggle family duties with paid work.

Progress has not been even everywhere. Regions like Andalusia and Extremadura still
don’t have gender equality plans for two out of three vital sectors – healthcare and education. “It’s sad that you actually have to put laws in place to make it mandatory, but it’s even sadder when there’s a law but it’s not being enforced,” Fernández said.

While the COVID-19 pandemic helped normalise remote working, more needs to be done to promote flexible working hours for people who would benefit from them. “For many jobs, it doesn’t matter when you work as long as you get things done, so why not let women have more flexibility around how they spend their eight hours rather than having them go down to part-time and earn less,” said Fernández. This could be done through so-called “hour banks” – pools of flexible hours allowing women to take time off for caretaking duties and “give back” the hours at a later point.

“If there’s will and specific actions are implemented it’s possible to reduce the gender pay gap, but to do that you need to do a holistic analysis and there’s no one silver bullet,” Besteiro said.

Data: Eurostat

Read more about what works to close the gender pay gap in the special report produced by Gloria Media — Equal Pay: What Really Works.

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