On International Women’s Day, just ahead of Commonwealth Week 2008,
trade unions in all 53 countries called for an end to the gender pay gap
that sees women’s pay lag behind men’s by up to 27% in some parts of the Commonwealth. They also called on five Commonwealth countries to ratify
the ILO Convention on Equal Remuneration, and a further 40 countries who
have ratified it to actually collect statistics on the gender pay gap to
see whether they are implementing it.

ITUC Women’s Committee Chair Diana Holland, from the UK, said:
"It is appalling that in an organisation formally headed by one of the
richest women on the planet - the Queen - women in so many Commonwealth countries are paid so much less than the men who do equivalent jobs.
Even worse is the absence of statistics across most of the Commonwealth, and the fact that ILO Convention 100 - adopted two years before the Queen ascended to the throne - remains unratified by one in ten Commonwealth countries."

A report drawn up by IDS for the International Trade Union Confederation
found that only eight of the 53 members of the Commonwealth collect
reliable data on women’s pay compared to men’s.

The lowest gender pay gap is in Malta (3%) and the highest is in
Singapore (27.3%) but some of the figures are unreliable, as informal
sector pay levels are rarely included in official statistics and often
trap women in low paid work. Other countries surveyed included:
Australia (14.1%), Botswana (23.3%), Cyprus (24%), New Zealand (13.8%), Sri Lanka (7.3%) and United Kingdom (20.0%).

Five Commonwealth countries had not even ratified the core ILO
convention on equal pay - Convention 100, adopted in 1951 - Brunei,
Kiribati, Namibia, Samoa and the Solomon Islands. A further four
Commonwealth countries are not ILO members (Maldives, Nauru, Tonga,
Tuvalu).

The Commonwealth Trade Union Group represents over 30 million trade
unionists in 53 countries. The Commonwealth accounts for 1.8 billion of
the world’s people - almost one in three.

The ITUC represents 168 million workers in 155 countries and territories
and has 311 national affiliates.

For more information, please contact the ITUC Press Department on: +32 2224 0204 or +32 476 621 018