A female employee was found to be receiving some €6,000 less than her male colleagues when the equality watchdog investigated a local company last year.
The employee flagged the issue to the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality after she overheard her co-workers discussing their monthly salaries. Hers, she was shocked to discover, was some €500 less monthly.
“We were alerted to this potentially discriminatory situation and immediately started looking into the wages offered to workers of the same designation within this company,” commission sources told this newspaper. “What we found was a situation that was discriminatory,” the sources added.
The company was urged to rectify the situation, and Times of Malta is informed the employee has since been offered a €500 monthly increase. It was unclear at the time of writing whether the employee accepted to stay on after discovering the discrimination against her.
A female employee from a different company contacted this newspaper with her story of discrimination and how she had discovered she was earning a significantly lower wage and working in inferior conditions to her male colleagues. She left her job the minute she discovered the abuse and took to warning fellow employees that they too could be victims.
She called the NCPE after overhearing her co-workers discussing their monthly wages
The issue of equal pay for equal work hit the international headlines earlier this month when the BBC’s China editor resigned, citing the gender pay gap.
NCPE sources said that finding out about such cases in Malta was proving difficult, as most employment contracts forbid employees from discussing their contracts with their colleagues.
“Unless employees find out that they may be victims of discrimination and flag it to us, it is very difficult to uncover these cases of abuse, which we believe are more rampant than figures indicate,” the sources said.
According to the latest Eurostat figures, women in Malta earn the equivalent of six weeks less than men for a year’s work.
Published in November the gender data shows that the pay rate for local women is 11 per cent lower than men.
Data issued by the EU statistics office earlier last year listed Malta’s as the second-lowest gender pay gap across Member States, but updated figures later showed this was no longer the case and the island had slipped to ninth place.
What this means is if a man earns a monthly salary of €2,500, a woman holding the same position gets €2,225, for no reason other than being a woman. At the EU level, the average gender wage gap stood at 16.7 per cent in 2014, the year under review in the latest figures.
NCPE sources yesterday told this newspaper it had drafted proposals for the government’s consideration to enable it to further combat gender discrimination – particularly focused on pay.
Asked for an update on the situation, the Equality Ministry said proposals were still being reviewed.
ivan.martin@timesofmalta.com