With Dare to Share: Germany’s Experience Promoting Equal Partnership in Families (2017), Good Practice for Good Jobs in Early Childhood Education and Care (2019), and Bringing Household Services Out of the Shadows: Formalising Non-Care Work in and Around the House (2021), the OECD previously explored a range of policy options to promote gender equality through the improvement of parental care options and the quality of childcare‑ and household services. Building on The Role of Firms in Wage Inequality: Policy Lessons from a Large Scale Cross-Country Study (2021) this report takes a detailed look at the gender wage gap in Germany while tying these findings to an overall package of policy measures needed to address the gender wage gap.
With growing numbers of women in employment, the persistent gender difference in pay has come to the fore. This review explores the gap in pay between men and women with equivalent skills within the same firms and across firms. It does so at each age to cast light on the evolution of the gender wage gap across the working life. Throughout, the results for Germany are systematically benchmarked to those of four nearby countries: Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Sweden.
This report was prepared by a team of analysts in the OECD Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (ELS), including senior economists Willem Adema and Alexander Hijzen and analysts Maja Gustafsson and Antton Haramboure. Under the leadership of Stefano Scarpetta (Director, ELS) and Mark Pearson (Deputy-Director, ELS), Monika Queisser (Senior Counsellor and Head of the Social Policy Division) and Stéphane Carcillo (Head of the Jobs and Income Division) supervised the project. We are grateful for comments on previous drafts as provided by Jonas Fluchtmann, Valentina Patrini, and Marie‑Anne Valfort as well as Thomas Fischer and Anja Heinze (German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth). Lucy Hulett, Eva Rauser and Natalie Corry prepared the report for publication, with Alastair Wood providing communications support.
Contributions from country experts with access to linked employer-employee data by Antoine Bertheau (Denmark), Katarzyna Grabska (Netherlands) and Andrei Gorshkov, Oskar Nordstrom Skans (Sweden) are also acknowledged. For Germany, this review makes use of the Sample of Integrated Employer-Employee Data (SIEED) (2002‑18) from the IAB. Data access was provided via on-site use at the CASD safe data centre in Palaiseau and subsequently remote data access under project “Glass doors and glass ceilings: The role of employers for the gender pay gap” (project number: 2110).
The OECD gratefully acknowledges the financial support by the Estonian Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth towards the preparation of this study.