Gender pay gap in Portugal

In Portugal, there is a basic wage gap of 16.7% between men and women (990.05€ and 824.99€, respectively). If other salary components are considered, such as supplementary compensation, bonuses and benefits, the injustice is even greater, with a difference of around 19.9% (1207,76€ vs 966,85€) (CIG, 2017). The association between this differential and the qualification levels is evident: higher the qualification level, greater the pay gap. According to data from EUROSTAT (2017), in 2016, among the least qualified workers, women earned 95.1% of the basic salary and 92.0% of the average monthly earnings of men. Among the so-called “more skilled workers”, differences were even greater, showing that the basic monthly average remuneration of women represented 73.6% of the remuneration of men, while the gain represented 72.1% compared to the average of men (CITE, 2020). When comparing the Portuguese data with the European data, it is clear that the national disparities are greater. In 2015, in the European Union (EU 28), women earned, on average, 16.3% less than men; in Portugal, this difference was 17.8%. This difference even increased by 2.9 percentage points compared to the previous year (CIG, 2017). Despite the advances of the last decades, Portugal continues to be a country where gender pay gap is very evident, with a long way of struggle and seeking justice still to go at this level.