The pay gap in monthly salary between men and women is 9.5%. The gap is biggest in senior management and smallest in expert jobs, and it starts to grow statistically significantly after about 12–13 years of experience.
Part of the pay gap can be explained by various background variables. For example, men are more likely than women to work in management, where salaries are higher. Women, on the other hand, are more likely than men to work in the public and university sectors, where salaries are lower than in the private sector.
“However, the various background variables explain only just under half of the gender pay gap. Even when we control for these factors, there still remains a so-called unexplained pay gap of 5.5%,” says TEK’s Salary Researcher Tuunia Keränen.
TEK has also studied the gender pay gap in the past. In 2016, 2013 and 2010, the unexplained pay gap was also around 5%. Before then, in surveys conducted in 2008, 2007 and 2003, the gap was around 6%, and between 1996 and 2003 the gap had narrowed by just under one percentage point.
Although progress in closing the pay gap has been slowly made, it has stalled in recent years This is despite the fact that every employer has a legal duty to promote equality in the terms of employment, especially in pay.
“Over the course of a year, this pay gap adds up to a substantial sum, let alone over several years or whole careers. For example, calculated on the basis of the median monthly salary of 5,665 euros for men, the unexplained pay gap amounts to 3,895 euros per year,” says Keränen.
How the survey was conducted?
The data for the pay gap study was taken from the salary data of the 2023 Labour Market Survey of the Academic Engineers and Architects in Finland TEK, including 8,416 respondents who were working full-time. The explanatory variables that were controlled for were years of experience, position, role, employer’s industry, number of employees, labour market region, degree programme, postgraduate degree and actual weekly working hours.