The gender wage gap in Catalonia was sharply reduced in 2023, but there are several structural factors that continue to prevent closing this inequality. The difference between what men and women earn fell from 24.2% to 20.1% in a single year, the most intense decline in the last decade, according to the report Gender salary gap in Catalonia, 2023 prepared by CCOO de Catalunya. The average annual salary of women stood at 27,241 euros gross, 6.2% more than in 2022, although the distance with men still translates into 5,481 euros less per year.
The evolution of the gap shows that there has been a clear improvement, especially in the lowest salary brackets. There was also a reduction in the salary per hour worked, going from 13.7% to 10.2%. However, this correction does not mean that the problem is solved, because there are mechanisms that continue to push female income downwards, that is, where the greater presence of women in part-time work, the interruption of work trajectories due to caregiving and the concentration in lower-paid activities. The gap decreases, but does not disappear.
One of the elements that most explains this difference is part-time work. While 6.4% of men work this type of shift, among women the percentage rises to 19.7%, more than triple that. This means that the comparison by hour worked offers only part of the picture, because it leaves out many women who not only earn less for the type of occupation they perform, but also work fewer hours in a way that is not always voluntary. Partiality remains one of the main drivers of pay inequality.
The gap also widens with age and with advancing working life. Between 25 and 34 years old it stands at 9.8%, but rises to 18% between 35 and 44 years old, a range that coincides with motherhood and with a greater care burden. From there the distance continues to widen, reaching 20.8% between 45 and 54 years old and reaching 29.5% among those over 55. Women’s salaries grow over the years, but men’s salaries grow more.
Furthermore, inequality hits sectors and occupations with the worst salary conditions most intensely. In elementary occupations, the gap reaches 46.7%, and in restaurants, commerce and sales it reaches 42.9%. But it does not disappear at high levels of responsibility either, since among directors and managers, men earn on average 9,847 euros more per year than women in the same position. This shows that the gap does not respond only to precariousness, but also to the different economic valuation of jobs and the promotion difficulties that continue to affect women.
The report itself also introduces some relevant methodological cautions. The salary survey used does not include domestic workers, a highly feminized group with low salaries, and also tends to make part of the labor instability invisible when it estimates annual salaries based on discontinuous trajectories. Even so, the recent trend has improved appreciably, and the study places a theoretical horizon at 2035 for closing the gap if the rate of reduction observed in the last five years is maintained. The salary gap has narrowed, but the Catalan labor market still continues to pay women worse.