The European Union has fixed 5 March 2011 as the date to celebrate the first European Equal Pay Day. This initiative aims to bring attention to the rest of the days that women must work to match the amount of money earned by men, given that according to recent figures women in the European Union earn on average 17.5% less than men during their lifetimes.

The celebration of the first European Equal Pay Day represents one more Commission's initiative aimed to tackled gender inequalities following its commitment to closing the gender pay gap for what it published an overall strategy for gender equality in September 2010.

These type of initiatives, whose main objective is to raise awareness of the pay gap, also tries to highlight problems which derive from this situation such in the long term, such as the fact that due o pay gap women will also have lower pensions. As a result 22% of women aged 65 are more likely to face poverty to 16% of men.

In order to tackle all these problems the European Commission has put in place a series of initiatives aimed to reach equal treatment, one of EU's founding principles, which was already part of the Treaty of Rome in 1957. For this purpose, in the days preceding the first European Equal Pay Day, Commissioner Reding met with CEOs and chairs of boards from some of Europe's top firms to discuss how to increase the number of women in company boardrooms.

The actions put in place by the European Commission in order to tackle the gender pay gap include

• Support equal pay initiatives at the workplace such as equality labels, “charters,” and awards, such as those identified in a recent EU study of non-legislative initiatives for companies to promote gender equality at the workplace
• Support the development of tools for employers to correct unjustified gender pay gaps; such as the Logib tool, which is used in Germany and Luxembourg and allows companies to identify gender pay gaps within their organisations
• Explore ways to improve pay transparency as well as the impact on equal pay of atypical working arrangements such as part-time work and fixed-term contracts
• Seek to encourage women and men to enter non-traditional professions; make it easier for both women and men to balance work-life duties

Awareness-raising activities are essential to inform employers, employees and stakeholders why there is still a gender pay gap and how we can reduce it. The Commission is therefore continuing an EU-wide information campaign with actions across the 27 EU Member States. An online gender pay gap calculator allows employees and employers to visualise the gender pay gap.