This year, International Equal Pay Day on 18 September arrives with a new argument. On 9 September, at the high-level conference of the Irish Presidency of the Council held in Dublin, EIGE launched its “Gender Equality and Competitiveness” campaign. The claim: equality is no longer only a matter of justice, but also one of efficiency. It deserves to be taken seriously enough to ask — does gender equality make companies more competitive?
At the macro level, the projections are ambitious. EIGE estimates that closing gender gaps would raise EU GDP per capita by between 6.1% and 9.6% by 2050. That is the output of an econometric model, not a measurement: it says what would happen if certain assumptions held.
At firm level, the evidence is more qualified than the headlines. Post and Byron’s meta-analysis (2015), covering 140 studies and some 90,000 firms in 35 countries, finds a positive association between women on boards and accounting returns, but a near-zero one with market performance — and it is moderated by context, turning positive in countries with greater gender parity and negative where there is less. These are correlations.
The best causal evidence comes from transparency. In 2006 Denmark required firms above a certain size to publish wage statistics disaggregated by sex. Bennedsen and colleagues (Journal of Finance, 2022) find the pay gap fell by two percentage points, or 13%, achieved mainly by slowing men’s wage growth rather than raising women’s. Affected firms hired and promoted more women. The wage bill fell; so did productivity; profits did not move. An uncomfortable conclusion: transparency narrows the gap, but the competitiveness dividend is not automatic.
Where the efficiency argument is solid is job evaluation. The inequality that persists is not direct but indirect: supplements accrue to male-dominated posts, and female-dominated occupations are undervalued. Recital 31 of Directive (EU) 2023/970 is blunt about it: classification systems that carry stereotypes value differently jobs that are of equal value. If a firm pays part of its workforce below the value it contributes, that is not only unfair — it is a misallocation of resources.
Hence the Directive’s four gender-neutral criteria — skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions — and its warning not to undervalue interpersonal skills. Spain’s official tool (Order PCM/1047/2022) breaks them into some twenty sub-factors, and the evaluation gains validity when the negotiating committee carries it out.
What is missing is compliance. The transposition deadline expired on 7 June 2026 and Spain has not met it. Meanwhile, Spain’s gap in annual earnings rose to 16% in 2024, the first increase in eleven years. Competitiveness is a hypothesis worth testing. It is not yet a conclusion.
References
- EIGE, Economic benefits of gender equality in the EU (model E3ME): +6,1–9,6% PIB per capita el 2050.
- Post, C. & Byron, K. (2015). “Women on Boards and Firm Financial Performance: A Meta-Analysis”. Academy of Management Journal, 58(5), 1546–1571.
- Bennedsen, M., Simintzi, E., Tsoutsoura, M. & Wolfenzon, D. (2022). “Do Firms Respond to Gender Pay Gap Transparency?”. The Journal of Finance, 77(4), 2051–2091.
- Directiva (UE) 2023/970, considerant 31 i art. 4.4; termini de transposició: 7 de juny de 2026.
- Ordre PCM/1047/2022, de 1 de novembre (procediment de valoració de llocs de treball).
- INE, Encuesta Anual de Estructura Salarial 2024 (publicada el juny de 2026): bretxa en guany anual del 16%.
Associate professor of Sociology at the University of Girona