According to provisional Eurostat data, Latvia greatly improved equality of pay in 2021. After exhibiting the most unequal pay between the sexes in 2020 with a difference of 22.3% between male and female pay rates, 2021 saw a dramatic improvement with the difference falling to 14.2%.
That figure is better than Estonia, France, Germany, Finland, Czechia, Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia within the EU and better than Switzerland in the European Economic Area.
However, the improvement may be short-lived if it is attributable mainly to state support measures to mitigate the effects of the Covid pandemic. We will have to wait for the next batch of data to see if Latvia slides back down the pecking order.
