Breathe
By Fátima Masse
On Friday, November 15, the following was published in the Official Gazette of the Federation the reform to guarantee the eradication of the gender wage gap from the Constitution.
It sounds good, it seems that as of this weekend men and women will earn the same if they do the same job. However, the reality is not so simple. The wage gap phenomenon is complex and, like a Swiss Knorr bucket, it concentrates a series of inequalities that will take time to combat.
The wage gap is partly due to the structural discrimination it describes Claudia Goldin, Nobel Laureate in Economics 2023. Women absorb the lion's share of care, which influences their economic decisions. To the extent that women seek greater job flexibility, they also sacrifice the possibility of reaching better positions or achieving higher hourly wages.
In the short term we will see secondary laws and regulations that seek to reduce the wage gap. I do not know what measures the Federal Government is considering. However, companies and organizations can start working today to get ahead of the regulations and foster more egalitarian work environments.
The first step is to measure the gender pay gap for each job level. This is something that Mexican companies are not used to. Many leaders are satisfied with stating that "in their workplaces there is no discrimination", but they do not have a concrete figure to verify if this statement is really true.
In a recent study I did for UN Women and the Global Compact Mexico that was presented at the #ForoWepsMx and will be published soon, we found that 34% of companies committed to sustainability do not know how big their wage gap is. We are talking about companies that know how important it is to invest in their people and in equality.
What will this proportion look like for all companies in Mexico? The figure cannot be calculated, but my intuition says that the proportion is much lower because it is not a priority issue.
For the gender pay gap to close, more companies need to measure the difference between what women and men earn for each job level, including salaries, bonuses and benefits. This can contribute in two ways. First, it will allow them to identify if they have gaps, understand where they come from and design actions to close them. Second, it will allow them to get ahead of possible measures to force pay transparency, as is the case in Great Britain and the rest of Europe .
In this time of women, we want to see more organizations move from narrative to action. Measuring the pay gap is a concrete way to do this and to trigger internal conversations that will build more inclusive work cultures.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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