Estonia's Gender Wage Gap Still Highest in EU
According to 2011 data released today, men in the European Union earn on average 16.2 percent more per hour than women. In Estonia, that figure is 27.3 percent, the highest disparity of all the member states.
Estonia has been at the forefront of wage disparity since 2006, when the difference was 29.8 percent, the European Commission said in a report today. Since peaking at 30.9 percent in 2007, the difference has been in slow decline.
Despite featuring in lower positions on nearly all other development indexes, Latvia and Lithuania score far higher points than Estonia on equality issues, with their salary disparity well below the union's average, at 13.6 and 11.9 percent.
Slovenia had the smallest gap, at 2.3 percent, while Austria and Germany joined Estonia in the bottom three, with 23.7 percent and 22.2 percent, respectively.
The EU's average gap has narrowed by 1.1 percentage points since 2008, while Estonia's difference has declined by 0.3 percentage points.
Statistics Estonia has published different figures, putting the nation's wage disparity at 24.6 percent in 2012, an increase of nearly two percentage points compared with 2011 results.