In 2015, Croatian men earned on average as much as 11,500 kuna (€1,550) more in a year than women, which is almost one and a half average Croatian gross monthly wage, gender equality ombudswoman Visnja Ljubicic said in Zagreb on Tuesday.

Ljubicic was presenting the European project Equal Rights – Equal Pay – Equal Pensions, which aims to achieve gender equality and combat risk of poverty for women in Croatia.

The average gross monthly wage in Croatia in 2015 was some 7,500 kuna (€1,000) for women and 8,400 (€1,130) for men, which means that women received on average 88.7 percent of the wages men received that year, Ljubicic said.

The gender pay gap leads to a pension gap, which in turn results in women facing social exclusion, poverty, and economic dependence on their husbands or male partners after leaving the labour market, she added.

The €470,000 project was launched on October 1 and will last until the end of September 2020. It is the fourth European project to be implemented by the gender equality ombudswoman in the last five years, through which a total of €2 million has been absorbed.

As part of the project, an in-depth study of the situation will be carried out at national level, educational programmes will be designed, workshops will be held in four cities and a national legislative framework for equal pay and pensions is expected to be drawn up.

The target groups of the project include executive and legislative authorities, public- and private-sector companies, trade unions, and secondary school students.

(€1 = 7.43 kuna)

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