BERLIN, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- The German business software producer SAP has announced on Wednesday to eliminate gender discrimination in employee pay by the end of the year.
"We have set ourselves the goal as a company to pay equal money for equal work and contribution", Cawa Younosi, SAP Head of Human Resources Germany, told the German press agency (dpa).
SAP has recently hired an external consulting firm to help analyze the salaries of all of its German employees. Younosi said that resulting corrections to pay levels would take place for 1.2 percent of the total workforce and should be completed in the course of December.
Unlike many other German companies, SAP does not operate a system of collective wages which defines a binding paygrade for different types of positions. As a key part of the country's "social partnership" model, collective wages form part of a post-war political settlement between employer- and employee representatives in Germany which granted workers significant rights with regards to their labor conditions and their role in the cooperative management of companies.
Since the start of the current year, German men and women employed in larger corporations have also been granted a new legal right to receive information about their colleagues' level of remuneration. The legislation offers an additional level of protection against discrimination to staff regardless of whether or not their employer offers collective wages.
Younosi admitted on Wednesday that the share of women who had benefited from the measures to ensure equal pay at SAP was larger than that of men. In spite of only accounting for around 30 percent of the overall German workforce, female staff members were the beneficiaries of 46 percent of the salary corrections conducted by the company.
