The gender pay gap is alive in Brussels — and women in NGOs pay the price for speaking up

“It’s career suicide…but this is why the abuse continues.” Anca Păduraru was working in the communications sector of an EU-funded NGO in Brussels until she realised that a colleague of her same experience and managerial level was being paid more than her. The colleague was a man. While on medical leave, and less than a year into becoming a mother, Anca was fired for having brought up the subject of the pay gap. “I was fired in 2024 on 8 March, so on International Women’s Day,” she told EUobserver. What ensued was a labour tribunal battle she eventually lost, costing her family over €60,000. The originally Romanian citizen refused to stop fighting, and submitted an appeal in September 2026 for multiple counts of discrimination, despite her former employer’s successful court narrative depicting Anca as unreliable, and greedy. The in-office conversations that had revealed the discrepancy in pay had not been recorded, while her employer had held the right to withhold the pay structure, the pay criteria, and the guidelines of employment. “It's about what proof a woman needs to prove pay disparity, which only the employer has,” she said. That’s what Brussels’ most recent legislative effort was built to protect against, in the form of the EU Pay transparency directive. Workplaces employing more than 100 people would have a duty to report on the company’s gender pay gap figures. The implementation deadline for the directive had been set at 7 June 2026, by which time all but five member states had managed to transpose it into their own systems. Among those laggards is Belgium, which has only implemented the directive as far as its public offices, while EU data shows that the private sector harbours a significantly higher pay gap. In Belgium’s case, numbers for income difference go from the second-lowest rate in the EU at 0.7 percent in all sectors to 6.1 percent in the private sector. A study by the World Economic Forum from 16 September found the global gender gap to stand at 30.8 percent, having improved by 5.2 percent in 20 years. Europe is its highest overall performer. With an EU average pay gap of 11.1 percent in 2024, the pay transparency directive was seen as a major reform to advance the cause for equal workplaces. But that left out smaller workplaces like Anca’s. She had no real figure to turn to in reporting gender pay discrimination, as “in small organisations, there is no human resources,” nor are there real transparency obligations.