Gender Pay Gap in the Netherlands: Causes and Solutions

Women earn on average 13 percent less per hour than men. This is partly because men rise faster within a company. But women also receive less money than their male colleagues for exactly the same work.

Over an entire year, women in the Netherlands even earn 36 percent less than men. The main cause of this large difference is that women work fewer paid hours on average.

If we look at the gross hourly salary, women are still paid 13 percent less than men. This is partly because many women work in sectors with lower wages, such as healthcare and education. But even within the same branch of work there is a difference between the salaries of men and women.

The difference in hourly wages is not the same in every sector. In trade and financial services, the difference is up to 23 percent, according to figures from Statistics Netherlands for 2022. In education and public administration, the gap is limited to a few percent.

Women who work part-time get stuck on the career ladder, planning agency SCP said last year. It is often men who rise to managerial positions and therefore earn more within the same sector than their female colleagues.

How much do men and women work, paid and unpaid?

Women work an average of 20.7 hours per week, while men work an average of 33 hours per week. On the other hand, men spend less time on housework or childcare. For men this amounts to an average of 17.4 hours per week and for women 27.5 hours per week.

Negotiating women are not rewarded

But even when men and women do equal or equivalent work, men still earn 6 percent more. That is wage discrimination. It concerns an inexplicable difference in salaries.

In addition, men received more wages in the past two years: on average 16.4 percent. Women had to make do with a wage increase of 9.1 percent, according to the National Salary Survey, conducted by Intermediair and Nyenrode Business University.

A frequently heard explanation is that men negotiate better with their boss than women. The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights sees this as an opportunity to combat discrimination. The fact that employers leave so much room for negotiation leads to more subjective rewards.

Employers are not immune to prejudice and seem to give men the benefit of the doubt more often than women. For women, an attempt at negotiation can even be counterproductive. They then get a worse image with their boss, according to the National Salary Survey.

Why is there so much attention to the pay gap today?

November 14 is Equal Pay Day. Because women earn 13 percent less per hour, they symbolically work for nothing for the rest of the year.

As the pay gap has narrowed slightly in recent years, Equal Pay Day has been moved up. Five years ago the difference was still 15.5 percent and the day fell on November 4.

Last spring, the European Union issued a directive to close the gap more quickly. For example, the business community will soon have to show how much men and women earn compared to each other.

Women with a migration background earn even less

Employees are also rewarded for the time they have been employed, notes Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, who has conducted research into wage discrimination. On average, women interrupt their career more often due to motherhood. Men generally have longer and uninterrupted careers.

This partly explains why women with a migration background earn even less than women without a migration background. Turkish-Dutch women in particular stop working after having children. They earn on average 29 percent less per hour than other Dutch women, according to 2019 CBS research.

But this theory is not completely conclusive. Women with a Surinamese background work more hours on average than other Dutch women, but are paid 11 percent less. These differences persist across generations. Men with a migration background also earn less than other male employees.

This does not necessarily concern people who do equivalent work. The level of education, any language deficiency and cultural differences also play a role, according to Statistics Netherlands.

2023-11-14 11:22:46
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