Equal Pay Day Shouldn’t be a Thing: How the EU is Addressing the Pay Gap

Today is Equal Pay Day in the United States, which means women have had to work all of last year plus the first 85 days of this one just to earn what men made in 2025 alone. This year, Equal Pay Day falls on March 26, marking the current state of the gender pay gap: 81 cents on the dollar for full-time, year-round workers, and 76 cents when you factor in part-time and seasonal workers. The gap is significantly worse for women of color: Black women earn 67 cents, Native American women 59 cents, and Latinas just 57 cents for every dollar earned by a white, non-Hispanic man.

And here's the part that sucks a lot: the gender pay gap actually widened for the second consecutive year, the first time that has happened since such data has been collected. Pay transparency laws are expanding, awareness is at an all-time high, and yet we are moving in the wrong direction.

So what is happening?

Part of the answer is structural. More than 455,000 women left the U.S. workforce between January and August of 2025 as return-to-office mandates pushed working mothers, in particular, out of jobs that remote work had made accessible. You cannot close the pay gap while simultaneously shrinking the pipeline of women in the workforce.

But the other part of the answer is that awareness without accountability doesn't work. We've had Equal Pay Day since 1996 and the gap is still there.

Enter the EU

While the U.S. is currently moving in the wrong direction on pay equity data collection (more on that in a moment), the European Union is taking a structural approach that's worth paying close attention to.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive entered into force in May 2023, and EU member states have until 7 June 2026 to turn it into national legislation. That deadline is 10 weeks away and the requires of the Directive are substantial:

Before the hire: Job applicants must be informed about the initial pay range for a position before the job interview, at the latest during it. Pay structures must be gender-neutral and based on objective criteria. Job vacancies must be worded in gender-neutral terms.

For current employees: Employees have a legal right to request information in writing about their pay level and the average pay levels, broken down by gender, of workers doing the same or equivalent work. Employers must respond within two months.

For larger employers: In the first reporting period, all employers with 150 or more employees will be required to carry out gender pay gap reporting using pay data from 2026. If a gap of 5% or more is identified that can't be justified by objective, gender-neutral criteria, the employer must take remedial action. If not resolved within six months, a joint pay assessment with employee representatives is required.

What's happening in practice

Implementation is uneven. No member state has yet published a completed piece of legislation, though several are close. Malta has already introduced recruitment transparency requirements. Poland, Slovakia, Belgium, and others are ahead of the pack. France, however, is expected to miss the June deadline. Le France says that its 2018 Professional Equality Index already requires annual gender equality reporting for employers with 50+ employees, but additional legislation is still needed to fully align.

The patchwork implementation is a challenge for any employer operating across multiple EU countries. What's required in Poland may differ from what's required in Ireland. Compliance will not be one-size-fits-all.

Meanwhile, in the U.S.

This Equal Pay Day, the Equal Pay Today coalition is calling on the EEOC not to rescind the EEO-1 and related data collections, a dataset that has been in place through Democratic and Republican administrations since the 1960s. It's used to identify employment discrimination, focus agency resources, and give researchers and employers the data they need to understand workforce disparities. If we stop measuring, we stop being able to fix it.

Rescinding these collections means less transparency for employees and less accountability for employers.

What this means for founders and operators

Whether you're running a team in Paris, Berlin, or New York, pay equity is increasingly a compliance issue, a talent issue, and a culture issue.

The EU Directive is creating the infrastructure for accountability that voluntary efforts have never quite managed to build. If you have employees in the EU, you should be auditing your pay data now, not in May. And if you don't yet, the framework is still worth studying as a model for what doing it right" looks like.

Equal Pay Day should be getting earlier every year. Right now, it isn't. That's the problem we need to solve, and quickly.