Female HR-managers often work for less - August 26, 2009

For salary negotiations you often have to talk to HR-managers, but are they able to take care of themselves too? Our comparison of salaries shows that at least female HR-managers are not. In most cases they earn less compared to male HR-managers, although the differences between countries are huge.

We were able to collect data from eleven countries on four continents. We also compared between newcomers (two years of experienced) and the more seasoned HR-managers (twenty years of experience). We also tried to compare part-time workers and full-timers, but got only a few relevant figures.

Huge differences between countries

What strikes are the differences between high-earning countries and those where HR-manager earn less. Highest earners were in the US (Washington region) with euro 35 per hour, followed by the UK (euro 29 for men) and South Africa (euro 28 for experienced male HR-managers). Maybe it is not surprising that the highest-earners in Argentina (experienced HR-managers, euro 6,77) and Brazil (experienced HR-managers, around euro 4.50) are low, but between European countries we see really stunning differences for a job that should basically the same. In Belgium, hourly wages can be as high as euro 35, while in the Netherlands and west Germany they earn 10 euro per hour less. In Spain the salary is even lower: hovering around 15 euro per hour. Just wondering whether these HR-managers ever talk to each other about their own salaries.

Premium for men

Interesting are also the differences in the gender gap, between men and women they vary from slightly positive for women till 30 percent disadvantage. Female HR-managers in Argentina, Brazil and the Netherlands earn slightly more than their male colleagues, but the positive difference is only in the dimes per hour. The premium for male HR-managers is ten percent in Belgium and Germany (although slightly less in east Germany). The disadvantage for female HR-managers goes up to around 30 percent in the UK, Spain, Czech republic and South Africa.

 

Part-time

We tried to compare hourly wages for HR-managers also for part-times and full-timers. In the Netherlands we saw that hourly payment for part-timers is considerably lower than that for full-timers, on average 15 percent. That taps into our earlier discussion on our web poll on the gender gap for salaries. In some cases we saw that part-timers earn less than full-timers, but it is yet unclear whether that is because most part-timers in the Netherlands tend to be women. Unfortunately, we were unable to get data on part-timers in other countries, possibly because part-time work is anyway huge in the Netherlands, compared to other countries.

Earlier salary comparisons were made for pr-managers, lawyers, economists, nurses, truck drivers.

Please note that these figures were collected in August 2009 according to very specific profiles of HR-managers. For your own salary, please visit the WageIndicator of your country.

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