The 3.6% gap is not good news. This is why Romania doesn’t see the problem

Romania has one of the smallest genders pay gaps in the European Union: 3.6%, according to Eurostat, compared to a European average of about 12%. On June 7, the European deadline for a law that would make it more visible in depth expired. The deadline passed unnoticed. The two facts are linked — and together they say something about the way this country reads its own numbers.

A small number makes you think you don’t have a problem. That’s why no one has discussed missing the deadline: 3.6% seems almost solved. But 3.6% is a net, aggregate average. It says nothing about the mechanism. Claudia Goldin’s Nobel Prize-winning research shows that most of the gap doesn’t occur between low- and high-paying occupations — it occurs within the same company, in the same job, and it opens up suddenly 12–24 months after the birth of the first child. An average of 3.6% can hide exactly this mechanism, because it brings together a trajectory that breaks with one that does not break.

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