EU moves toward pay transparency directive

At the European Employment and Social Policy Council, which took place in Brussels, Belgium, on December 10, 2019, ministers of several European countries held a public debate on the future of the continent's gender equality policies. Based on those discussions, the Council of the European Union (EU) adopted a number of conclusions on social matters.

In its conclusions on gender-equal economies in the EU, the council emphasized that equality between women and men is one of the founding values and fundamental principles of the EU. Therefore, the council directly asked the new European Commission to "explicitly set gender equality as a political priority in its current term (2019-2024) and adopt a communication setting out a stand-alone high-level EU gender equality strategy for the period post-2019." The commission has also been called on to "implement concrete and effective measures to close the gender gaps in employment and pay" beyond the current EU action plan on tackling the gender pay gap.

Those concrete measures could take the shape of a directive or a regulation creating binding obligations on EU member states. That appears to implement the recent suggestion of the powerful European trade unions that the commission draft a gender pay transparency European directive.

The commission's reaction was not long in coming. On January 6, it launched an initiative titled "Strengthening the principle of equal pay between men and women through pay transparency" with the purpose of: