With economist Claudia Goldin winning the Nobel Prize in economics “for advances in understanding the outcomes of women’s labour market participation”, the gender earnings gap is becoming a more widely discussed topic in both the US and Europe. Goldin’s report looks at women’s earnings and labour market participation over the centuries and is based on research and data collection spanning over 200 years in the US.
According to a Eurostat statistic in 2021, Romania has the second lowest gender pay gap, at 3.6%. At the bottom of the statistics is Estonia, with a gap of 20.5%, and the smallest contrast is in Luxembourg, at 0.2%. In the private sector, Romania has a gender pay gap of 10.2%, double that of the public sector, according to a study also carried out by Eurostat in 2021.
In contrast to Romania, according to Eurostat statistics, the gender pay gap in Bulgaria in 2021 is 12.2%.In the EU, the average gender pay gap is 12.7%, the same source adds.
Reasons for the pay gap in Romania and Bulgaria
The reasons for this gap are varied. For example, almost a third of women (28%) work part-time, while only 8% of men work part-time. And Romania has such a low gap because only 3% of women work part-time, 1% less than men.
The Nobel prize winner also says that one of the main reasons behind the gender pay gap is that women cannot devote as much time to their careers as men because their time is often taken up with housework, maternity leave and childcare.
In Europe, women are much more prevalent in low-paid sectors, with 24% of women working in fields such as health and education. According to a study by the BestJobs recruitment platform, a generous number of women work in fields or departments where empathy, caring for others and interpersonal skills are important, such as in healthcare, where women mostly occupy positions as nurses, doctors and pharmacists, in human resources and education, where women are mainly educators or work in positions in primary and pre-university education.
The other fields where the workforce is dominated by women are marketing, communication, customer support and sales, production/logistics, management, administrative, transport, tourism and finance/accounting. Romania also ranks third in the percentage of women in IT in the EU, with 26.2%, according to the same BestJobs study.
In the case of Bulgaria, a study by the Institute for Market Economics (IME) announced on 8 March 2023 shows that over twenty years the gender pay gap in Bulgaria has narrowed, but remains on average 18% in favour of higher pay for men.
According to the same study, the pay gap is most significant in the financial sector, health, ICT sector, manufacturing and culture, sport and entertainment, where women earn more than 30% less than men.
Ionela Băluță, a professor at the Faculty of Political Science and director of the Centre for Equal Opportunities Policy, said in an interview with Karola Bilibók for the Átlátszó Erdély newspaper that the increased number of women in fields such as IT and law is “due to the communist regime”, and argues that although “communism has caused a lot of harm, it has initiated a gender equality dynamic in many areas”.
“For example, before 1989 you had some elections, in a way elections were less gendered than now. The choices were not many, mostly Polytechnics and medicine were presented, precisely because foreign languages and all such specializations were very limited, controlled by the regime. So that’s where it comes from that, statistically speaking, more girls and women in Romania are specialising in fields based on exact sciences, such as computer science,” says the director of the Centre for Equal Opportunities Policies.
In 2021, European women spent an average of 11.1 hours on childcare/education, 4.2 hours on caring for the elderly or disabled and 14.7 hours on household activities such as cooking and cleaning. These hours are unpaid hours, and are still “on women”, according to a European Parliament statistic.
If for women, children in the family lead to a “loss” of jobs, for men it is the other way around – they are a factor that increases employment rates, regardless of education level.
“The obvious explanation for the opposite effect of children lies in the distribution of roles in the family, as women more often choose to take care of children and the household without seeking formal employment and, conversely, men need jobs to support the household. Of course, there is also another explanation, namely that working men find it easier to find a partner with whom to start a family and have children,” the EMI said, as quoted by Mediapool.
Although Romania has a small pay gap, the country is known for being the worst in Europe in terms of women’s representation in certain important segments of society, such as politics. This year, women make up a third of Romania’s government, with six women in office out of a total of 20, and it is one of the governments with the fewest female ministers. Romania has had one female prime minister and several female mayors in its 42 county municipalities.
At the other end of the spectrum, data from the Global Gender Gap 2023 study shows that Bulgaria has the third highest proportion of women in leadership positions in the world. 28.8% of organisations in the country have women in management positions, while only Latvia (32.6%) and Lithuania (30.7%) rank higher.
According to experts, in recent years, women have increasingly proved themselves to be suitable for leadership positions, writes Careers.bg.
Experts’ views on this gender pay gap in Romania and Bulgaria
“In traditional society, the public sphere is occupied by men, while women find their place in the private sphere of the family. It was in the 20th century that feminist movements won women the right to vote and exist in the public sphere. Paid work is one aspect of participation in public life, but women were latecomers. Sociological studies show that women are more likely to occupy lower-level professional positions and less likely to be in management positions, and are more likely to be found in part-time positions than in executive positions. In addition, there are ‘feminine’ fields such as education or secretarial work which are less well paid and less respected as occupations than those considered ‘masculine’, important and better paid such as technical or IT”, explained Raluca Petre, associate professor at Ovidius University and specialised in sociology, for Info Sud-Est.
Raluca Petre believes that one of the reasons why the pay gap between women and men is so low in Romania is the communist period, which focused on bringing women into the workforce, and this has led to women entering the labour market en masse, just like in the communist/socialist period in Bulgaria, Slovakia and Hungary, with a similar salary to men, even though they work almost twice as much, both at work and at home, but unpaid.
The sociology specialist says another reason for the low percentage is the violation of the pre-Natalist Decree 770/1966, which deprived women of the right to abortion. According to the professor, men were not held accountable, and were even rewarded if they reported women who attempted a termination. What’s more, just three months after the “wanted or unwanted” birth, women would return to work to raise all the children the system wanted.
“This policy now translates into this small disparity between wages. In principle, this is laudable, but it must be understood that in Romania we have not had a similar process of sharing domestic work as in Western Europe and Scandinavian Europe. And this means that women work much more than men, once at home and a second time at work, but at least the difference in pay is not so great”, concluded Raluca Petre.
As for Bulgaria, the president of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of Bulgaria (CICSB), Plamen Dimitrov, told BNR that the difference between the average wages of men and women in Bulgaria is due to the fact that women work in lower paid sectors, while for men, employment is dominated by two of the three highest paid economic activities.
“For example, for the creation and dissemination of information, the gap between women and men is 33% – if a man earns 5,300 leva, a woman earns 3,600 in this sector (…) The same is true with finance – women earn 38% less in the financial sector,” Plamen Dimitrov says at a national conference on gender equality and working conditions organised by the trade union, as reported BNR.
*Kristina Mincheva contributed to this article
Article published as part of a Thomson Foundation project in collaboration with Marginalia newspaper (Bulgaria).
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