The Equal Pay for Male and Female Employees Law, 1996 (the ‘Law’) establishes a gender equality obligation with respect to wages and other work-related compensation. Until recently, the Law only imposed an obligation to report gender data regarding employee wages on certain employers (mainly those that are budgeted by the State and Public entities).
However, in August 2020, the government published a significant amendment to the Law (the ‘Amendment’). This Amendment imposes a duty on all employers employing more than 518 employees, to publish information about the average wage differentials between male and female employees. The first reports should be published by 1 June 2022, in relation to 2021.
The Amendment also states that, beginning on 1 June 2022, the Minister of Labor, Welfare and Social Services may, with the consent of the Minister of Finance and with the approval of the Knesset’s Health and Welfare Committee, extend the Amendment’s requirements to cover employers with 518 or fewer employees as well.
Even before the Amendment, employers were required to provide employees, at their request, with information about their employees’ wage levels (subject to certain lawful limitations). However, the Amendment now requires the applicable employers to following three levels of employer-initiated disclosure:
1. An internal report, once a year, based on data it collects, in which it will detail its employees’ average wages, for each employee segment, while detailing the average wage differentials between male and female employees, in percentages, for each group of employees at the workplace.
2. Provide each employee with information about the employee group to which the employee belongs, the employee segment, employee classification, positions or ranks in the group and the wage differentials in such group, in percentages. This disclosure should take place annually together with, and based on the Internal Report, provided the disclosure does not violate any other legal requirement.
3. A public report, including, among other things, data (in percentages) regarding the average wage differentials among the employer’s employees, by employee segment and scope of employment, with reference to gender, as well as data (in percentages) regarding the rate of the employer’s employees whose wages are lower than the average wages at the workplace, with reference to gender, all as specified in the Amendment. The Public Report must be published once each year, in conjunction with (and based on) the Internal Report.
