#12 Equal Pay - From Childhood to Enforced Laws

Fish in the Boardroom

With Deborah Halter

Notes

By law, men and women are equal, unfortunately, statistics show, when it comes to salary this is not the case. There has been lots of talk about this, but where do we stand today? What has been done and what can we do?

Deborah Halter walks us through the numbers for Switzerland and tells us about her experience working with companies.

“In 2018, 61% of all people receiving a monthly wage of less than CHF 4000 for a full-time job were women, whereas 81% of people earning more than CHF 16 000 for a full-time job were men. This nicely sets the picture we are looking at.”

What you will learn

· Salary Discrimination starts in childhood, yet at the beginning of a career, both genders earn the same.

· The pay gap starts when women have children and their career opportunities decrease, as single women earn the same as men.

· The average salary gap between men and women has increased between 2014 and 2018.

· Equal value can be measured even between seemingly very different positions such as nurses and policemen.

Tips

· Ask for the results of your company’s equal pay analysis

· Be aware of the different perception of value between care work and creation work and start building an objective salary system based on specific criteria not on people

· Don’t be afraid to talk about salary with your colleagues and research Swiss benchmarks using for example the salarium tool

Resources

Statistics by FSO (Federal Statistics Office)
(BfS - Bundesamt für Statistik, OFS - Office federal de la statistique, UST - Ufficio federale di statistica),

Federal Office for Gender Equality
The FOGE is committed to legal equality between women and men as well as equal opportunities and pay in professional life; including prevention from sexual harassment at work; and to a balanced distribution of tasks within the household and against domestic violence.

Logib tool for the analysis of you're company's pay gap

Salarium, statistical salary calculator by the Swiss Statistics office

Find Deborah online

LinkedIn

Gender Equality Advising

Biography

Deborah Halter was born and raised in the German part of Switzerland where she studied business in St. Gallen. After her Bachelor's degree, she worked for multinational companies in Marketing and Key Account Management. The question of gender equality accompanies Deborah since her time at university and she has studied the topic ever since. In 2019 she founded her company Gender Equality Advising to support companies on their journey to more gender equality. Specializing in the gender pay gap analysis.