Germany is to try to bridge the pay gap between men and women by forcing companies to be more transparent about wage structures.
Angela Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats and their centre-left coalition allies have agreed in principle on rules under which employees at businesses with more than 200 staff will have a right to see anonymised data on the wages of men and women in comparable positions.
Companies with more than 500 employees will be asked to carry out checks and publish reports on gender pay parity every five years.
In order to establish a system of comparing professional roles across a variety of sectors, Germany will introduce a points-based system that breaks down wages into separate parts.
The regulations will apply to about 14 million workers in Germany, including those in the public sector.
The Social Democrat family minister, Manuela Schwesig, who proposed the measures 10 months ago, described Thursday’s agreement as an important breakthrough.
Discussions between the two coalition parties had stalled because of CDU concerns that the requirements would increase bureaucracy and create “a climate of distrust and surveillance”. It is unclear when the rules will become law.
According to the country’s office for statistics, women in Germany earn on average 21% less than men, often due to the fact that women are less likely to be employed in highly paid sectors and more likely to work part-time.
Even when such factors are accounted for, women on average still earn 7% less than men working in comparable positions.
The gender pay gap continues to be wider in the western half of the country than in the states that used to make up the communist east. In 2015 the gap stood at 8% in the former GDR and 23% in the west.
Germany was ranked 11th in the World Economic Forum’s 2015 global gender gap report, behind the likes of Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden.
