Facade of the Palace of Santa Cruz, headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs CLAUDIO ÁLVAREZ
The gender pay gap between the staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reaches 37%, according to a report by the Court of Accounts on the operational control of equality between men and women in said department in the years 2017 to 2019. It is not that the Women are paid less than men for the same position, which would be illegal, but they mostly occupy the lowest paid positions.
In fact, 37% is the so-called “unadjusted salary gap”, which does not take into account differences in job position or seniority, while the adjusted one is 8% for personnel assigned in Spain and 25.8 % abroad.
Although women account for 44% of the official and labor staff of the department (12 points less than in the public administrations as a whole), they occupy 53% of the positions in Spain and only 35% of those abroad, which are the better paid.
In the diplomatic career, the elite of the ministry, made up of 776 people, women represent 25.4% of the total, but they are only 22% of diplomats posted abroad.
In November 2019, only 15.6% of the 125 heads of diplomatic missions (ambassadors accredited to other States or multilateral organizations) were women.
"This means that there are 10 points of difference between the presence of women in the diplomatic career and their participation as heads of mission", adds the report of the Court of Accounts.
If ministry jobs are divided into quartiles, women are overrepresented in the lowest paid (55%) and underrepresented in the highest paid (21%).
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Although the incorporation of women to the diplomatic career is relatively recent, (their access was prohibited until 1970), they represented between 40% and 44% of those admitted to the Diplomatic School in the calls from 2017 to 2019. However, the study warns that the salary gap, which does not exist among newcomers to the career, opens and widens as they accumulate three years of seniority.
Some of the causes of this situation emerge in the survey included in the report, which 546 employees of the ministry answered.
According to their conclusions, 74% of diplomats with children put as the first criterion when choosing a destination the fact that the family can accompany them, while only 47% of diplomats give priority to this factor.
A striking fact is the opposing view that men and women have about how their gender conditions career advancement. 68% of diplomats believe that being a woman hurts their chances of becoming an ambassador, while 76% of diplomats think that being a woman benefits their colleagues. Conversely, 62% of women believe that men have an advantage because they are; and 58% of men think it hurts them. "The highly asymmetric perceptions observed between men and women can be an obstacle to progress towards balancing the position of women in the diplomatic career," the report warns.
Among the recommendations that the Court of Auditors directs to the Ministry, the most important are to make the Equality Unit really operational, to respect the criterion of balanced presence in the department's governing bodies and to provide the diplomatic corps with “reliable and periodic information on the situation of women within the ministry ”, given the“ scarce connection between perceptions and reality ”.
