Only a few employees have used their rights under the Pay Transparency Act for more equal pay for women and men, as a new report shows. According to the Family Ministry, the Federal Cabinet should discuss the expertise for reviewing the law on Wednesday. The law allows employees to request information about what other employees earn and thus compare their pay with colleagues of the opposite sex.
According to the report, the majority of employees have neither requested information nor plan to do so in the foreseeable future. “Specifically, four percent of employees state that they have made a request for information,” wrote the authors of the Institute for Applied Economic Research at the University of Tübingen. According to this, around 86 percent of those responsible in companies and departments surveyed are aware of the individual right to information for checking equal pay. The majority of the staff and works councils also know. “Nevertheless, the results show that companies and departments do not actively communicate the right to information to employees,” says the report. Only a third of the employees knew that they had a right to information. “Two-thirds don’t know their rights,” say the experts. “Among the other third, some see no added value in information, or they fear that a request for information could be viewed negatively by their superiors.”
The law came into force in July 2017. It should contribute to the implementation of the equal pay requirement – i.e. equal pay for equal work or work of equal value between the sexes. The individual right to information exists for employees in companies and offices with more than 200 employees. According to the Federal Statistical Office, women in Germany earned an average of 18 percent less per hour than men in 2022 – also because women often work in lower-paid professions and part-time. With comparable work, qualifications and employment history, women employees earned an average of seven percent less than men per hour.