The paycheck is the tip of the iceberg

The gender pay gap is visible on the paycheck. But that is where the story ends, not where it begins.

It starts much earlier: with how work is valued, how opportunities are distributed, who is expected to provide, who is expected to care, and whose career is given priority.

This is why equal remuneration for work of equal value matters. Women and men may perform different jobs that are nevertheless of equal value when assessed according to skills, effort, responsibility and working conditions. Enshrined in ILO Convention No. 100, this principle goes beyond asking whether two people doing the same job receive the same pay. It challenges the biases that determine which work is valued more in the first place.

Women and men remain unevenly represented across different occupations. Women are more likely to work in lower-paid or undervalued occupations, while men remain more heavily represented in positions associated with greater pay, authority and advancement. This occupational segregation reflects longstanding assumptions about what women and men are expected to do, and work predominantly performed by women is more likely to be undervalued.

Lebanon’s 2022 labour data make the consequences visible. 27.0 per cent of female employees were in low-paid work, compared with 21.5 per cent of male employees. Among employees with university education or above, the gender wage gap was 18.5 per cent. Women accounted for only 26.7 per cent of managerial positions.

The problem, then, is not a shortage of qualified women. It is what happens to their qualifications once they enter the labour market.

At the heart of this is an assumption that remains remarkably persistent: men provide; women care.

Even when women work for pay, their earnings have historically been treated as supplementary to a man’s income. At the same time, women continue to carry a disproportionate share of unpaid care and domestic work. This work sustains households, communities and the wider economy, yet remains largely invisible as an economic contribution.

That invisibility has economic consequences. Care responsibilities affect the time women can devote to paid work, professional development, networking and advancement. They can influence the jobs women take and the opportunities they can accept. Over time, unequal responsibility for unpaid care can become unequal accumulation of income, experience and career opportunity.

Parenthood makes this double standard particularly clear. Motherhood can carry an economic penalty through lower earnings, slower advancement and interruptions in employment. Fatherhood, meanwhile, can produce a fatherhood premium: men may be perceived as more responsible, stable or committed once they have a family. The same family status can therefore be interpreted as evidence of commitment for a man and a potential cost for a woman.

The consequences accumulate over a working life. A pay gap can become a promotion gap, a leadership gap and eventually a pension gap. What appears on the paycheck today can shape economic security decades later.

These inequalities are not only social; they can also be embedded in institutions. Lebanon amended Article 26 of its Labour Code in 2000 to prohibit discrimination between men and women in employment, including in wages, recruitment and advancement. Yet the provision does not fully operationalize the principle of equal remuneration for work of equal value. The ILO Committee of Experts has repeatedly called on Lebanon to incorporate this principle into the Labour Code and establish objective methods for evaluating the value of different jobs.

Lebanon therefore needs to move from a formal prohibition of discrimination to a system that can identify and address unequal remuneration in practice. This means objective job evaluation, greater transparency in pay and benefits, and effective monitoring and enforcement. It means looking beyond basic salaries to the broader elements of remuneration, including allowances, bonuses and other employment benefits.

It also means reviewing legislation and regulations through a gender-equality lens, including their coherence with Lebanon’s international obligations on equality and non-discrimination.

Equal pay is ultimately a question of accountability and good governance. It is also a question of how Lebanon uses the human capital it has invested in developing.

Lebanon educates its women. It invests in their skills and professional development. It should not then discount that investment by undervaluing their work, limiting their advancement or treating their economic contribution as secondary.

A country facing profound economic and human-capital pressures cannot afford to lose or undervalue talent simply because it is female.

Equal Pay Day is therefore not only about the number on a paycheck. The number we see is only the visible part. Beneath it lie the choices, expectations and institutions that determine whose work is valued, whose career advances, and whose economic security is protected.

That is the real gender pay gap and the part beneath the surface is the part we must change.