"Closing the gender pay gap requires a package of measures, central to which is decent work.
One of the most effective and quickest ways to narrow gender pay gaps is through minimum living wages (or wage floors) and universal social protection. Minimum living wages benefit all low paid workers. Since women are starkly overrepresented in low paid work, it would usually benefit women more dramatically. Germany, for example, recently introduced a national minimum wage to tackle its stubborn gender wage gap of 22.4 per cent.
This needs to be backed up by universal social protection, which entails income security to the unemployed or underemployed (the majority of whom again are women), paid maternity leave, child care and other social and health care support, insurance against lost earnings due to sickness or occupational injuries and, of course, adequate pensions in retirement. It’s crucial that such protections are extended to workers in the informal economy, who are often excluded, and overwhelmingly female.
Ensuring that workers have freedom of association and the right to organize and bargain collectively is also an important part of the solution. In the United States, the wage gap between men and women is 11 per cent for union women, compared to 22 per cent on average [6]. And in the United Kingdom, the wages of women union members are on average 30 per cent higher than those of non-unionized women [7].
The package of measures to close the gender pay gap must include the provision of quality public childcare and elderly care services, family friendly work-place policies. Policy measures that encourage men to share care responsibilities–for instance paternity leave—have proven useful to changing the social norms that drive the gender wage gap. The Scandinavian countries are a case in point and have so far made the most progress in this area.
Transparency within companies in criteria and decisions concerning pay can also help prevent gender bias."