The report, which had been commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Equality and was published Thursday, said that since 2015, there has been little change in the wage differences between women and men performing the same work.
“I find it completely unacceptable that women and men who have the same job, the same experience and the same competence, end up with different salaries," Culture and Equality Minister Lubna Jaffery told Norwegian news agency NTB.
The report by the Institute for Social Research, concluded that women who work in the same sector, industry and profession, have the same length of education and experience and similar job size, earn 8% less than men. If women also have the same professional title and employer, they earn 6% less than men.
“An important explanation is that men and women work in different parts of the labor market with different wage levels,” the 122-page Norwegian report said.
“We show how the wage gap varies across sectors, industries, education groups, occupations and labor market regions,” it said. “We find that women on average have longer education than men, but within fields of study with lower wages. The gap between men and women with equally long education is therefore larger than between all men and women.”
Norway, a country of 5.6 million, has often been described as at the forefront internationally in terms of gender equality and living standards. According to official Norwegian figures, about 70% of women participate in the workforce.
In October, the annual report from the U.S. Census Bureau said that in 2023, the gender wage gap between men and women working full-time widened year-over-year for the first time in 20 years. It said that women working full time earned 83 cents on the dollar compared to men in 2023, down from a historic high of 84 cents in 2022.