With or without dill

TALLINN - Pille Ruul, president of the Estonian Association of Business and Professional Women (BPW Estonia), says that the gap between wages of men and women for the same work grew to nearly 31 percent over the past year, reports Aripaev Online. “Unfortunately, the gap has increased in a year and Estonia is among the leaders in Europe with this. Last year, the gap was 30.3 percent; this year 30.9 percent and, unfortunately, the growth trend seems to continue,” Ruul said on ETV’s morning program.

She said that the problem is widely ranged and one of the reasons is the modesty of women. “Employment levels of women are one of the highest in Europe in Estonia and in line with the economic situation; women are ready to accept work for any wage, just to have a job. Analyzing last year, employers pointed out that if they have a man across the table at a job interview, he fights for as high a wage as possible, since he feels responsibility for family and obligations. Women don’t show such pressure,” said Ruul.

The wage gap is also facilitated by the so-called pink and blue jobs, or certain jobs are done mostly by women, others by men.
On April 14, when the European Union marks the day as one of equal wages, BPW Estonia will organize the joint action “With dill or without” (a non-translatable word play: the Estonian word “till” means both “dill” and “penis” in colloquial speech). On this day many catering places in Estonia post labels that salmon sandwiches (or some other food item) are on sale, but with two different prices. A salmon sandwich with dill is, by the wage gap, more expensive than the same sandwich without dill. With the help of wordplay and humor, women want to draw attention to the fact that the wages of men and women in Estonia differ for doing the same work.