Only 0.2 per cent of businesses in Malta will be obliged to publish annual reports on their gender pay gaps as set out in an upcoming EU directive on pay transparency.
The EU Pay Transparency Directive is set to come into force in June 2026, when member states including Malta must transpose it into their laws.
The directive includes several provisions that apply to all companies regardless of size, however; employers must disclose the initial salary or salary range in job advertisements or before interviews, and cannot prohibit employees from discussing or sharing salary information with colleagues.
Meanwhile, employees have the right to request information about their own pay and the average pay levels for the same or equivalent work, broken down by gender.
If a worker files a pay discrimination complaint, the burden of proof shifts to the employer to show that there is no discrimination.
However, the requirement to publish reports on gender pay gaps every year only applies to companies that employ 250 or more employees. Companies that employ between 100 and 249 employees are required to publish a report every three years.
The Maltese business landscape is dominated by small to medium enterprises, with data from 2022 showing that 107 businesses, or 0.2 per cent of total businesses, employ 250 or more people.
While the rest of Malta’s businesses are free to publish reports if they want to, they are not obliged to.
At a press conference on the occasion of International Women’s Day, the General Workers Union, together with academics Yana Mintoff and Mary Grace Vella called on the government to effectively transpose and implement the directive into law.
“Despite its criminalisation, pay discrimination is stil directly and indirectly gendered,” they said.
Examples of indirect discrimination include gendered caring responsibilities, a lack of work-life balance initiatives, and limited career progression and opportunities for social mobility.
Vella added that gender pay disparity is reduced when corporations and employers are obliged to become more transparent.
"More transparency enables better salary and more leverage when it comes to negotiations, which are usually more challenging for women," Mintoff said.
In 2022, Malta’s gender pay gap was 10.2 per cent, meaning that, on average, women earned 10.2 per cent less per hour than men.
GWU president Josef Bugeja noted that sectors that were highly regulated and organised, such as the public sector, tended to have more parity between genders.
“On the other hand, research shows that less regulated white-collar industries in Malta such as law, finance and real estate have high gender pay gaps,” he said.