Among the 20 countries in the Euro Zone, Portugal was not only one of the four Member States that recorded an increase in gender pay between 2019 and 2022.

It was also the country in the single currency space that had the biggest increase in the wage gap between men and women, according to ECO.

Currently, Portugal is the ninth country with the largest pay gap between men and women, despite having a ratio below the Euro Zone average (13.1%).

Despite the setback of the last four years, figures from the European Union's statistics office show that, in the last decade, Portugal was able to reduce gender pay at an average rate of 0.25 percentage points.

Thus, adopting a more optimistic view, considering that in the future the wage gap between men and women in Portugal will reduce at the rate of the last ten years, it will only be in 2071, within 48 years, that we will see wage parity between men and women in Portugal, according to ECO calculations.

If nothing is done to change this scenario of inequality, it means that Portugal will be only the 12th country in the Eurozone to achieve wage parity, behind countries like Luxembourg, which reached parity in 2021, and Spain ( 2031), Belgium (2046) or Germany (2047), and even the average of Eurozone countries, which are expected to reach the level of equal pay between men and women in 2052.

Even so, the year 2071 of wage parity in Portugal will be 83 years earlier than the year 2154, when the World Economic Forum estimates that parity between men and women will be achieved in the world - considering not only wage inequality but also other elements such as economic opportunities, educational success, health and survival, and political power.

However, Susana Tavares, professor at ISCTE, notes that Eurostat data are not used for official Portuguese statistics because they “only consider companies with more than ten employees”, thus not reflecting the Portuguese reality, in which the majority of companies has less than ten employees.