Women earn as much as men or more in 12% of Irish companies

The figure is due to more women in senior administrative and managerial positions, Galco said in its 2022 Gender Pay Gap Report.

Galco’s Irish company employs 22 women, accounting for 7.3 per cent of all employees.

Women, on average, earned significantly more than men at a handful of companies including utility company PrepayPower, a division of recruiter Cpl, the Public Appointments Service, call of Duty Manufacturer EA Games, an arm of SuperValu owner Musgrave, and Google’s Ireland-based cloud business.

At semi-state-owned An Post, clothing retailer H&M, Avoca Handweavers, Irish tech unicorn Stripe, beverage companies Heineken and Britvic, and US tech giant Microsoft, gender pay has been nearly equal since June this year.

The average gender pay gap in companies that have reported to date is between 11 and 12 percent in favor of men.

The biggest gaps are in law firms, consulting firms, financial firms, and some manufacturing, construction, and technology companies.

Financial firms paid men on average 20 percent more than women through June, with stockbrokers Davy and Goodbody reporting wage differentials of over 40 percent.

At law firms Arthur Cox and Mason, Hayes & Curran — and at a branch of construction giant CRH — the gap was 50 percent or more. At the law firm Matheson it was 61pc. Law firm figures include partners.

Around 660 large companies must report differences in average compensation and bonus payments by the end of this month under new laws.

Smaller companies must report from 2024.

The gender pay gap is different from wage discrimination – paying men and women differently for the same work – which is illegal.

The existence of a gender pay gap indicates a lack of gender representation at certain levels of the organization.

For example, Aer Lingus said its pay gap would be 10 times narrower if the (predominantly male) cohort of pilots were excluded, while law firm William Fry said it pays women slightly more on average, excluding partners.

Involving partners who are self-employed, and often have an equity interest in the company, increased William Fry’s average pay gap in favor of men to 32 percent.

According to the EU’s statistics agency, Eurostat, Ireland’s pay gap was 11.3 per cent in 2019. The average pay gap in the EU was 13 percent in 2020.

Other studies put the gap in Ireland at around 16 per cent, while Labor Senator Marie Sherlock thinks it could be as high as 22.2 per cent when hours worked are taken into account, as more women tend to work part-time to work and take career breaks to have children or to care for family members.