Not necessarily! The Directive generally reinforces the role of the principle of equal pay for work of the same or equal value, not only as regards the fight against unequal pay for women or the promotion of gender equality more broadly.

Firstly, therefore, men will be able to exercise all the rights provided for in the Directive on an equal footing with women. For example, they will be able to request wage levels for their category of workers broken down by gender. Should it turn out that a male employee earns less than a female employee in the same category, and this difference is not justified in any way, he will be able to claim exactly the same as his female colleague, should she find herself in a similar situation.

Secondly, as we have already written, proactive pay transparency obligations will be imposed on employers, e.g. the need to develop remuneration structures (to carry out a job evaluation process and make available applicable pay-setting criteria) or to disclose information on proposed remuneration at an early stage of recruitment. Employees and job applicants will benefit from all these solutions - completely independently of gender and other personal characteristics.

It is also worth noting that in accordance with the view presented in Supreme Court caselaw (most recently in the resolution of 24 August 2023, III PZP 1/23), an employee against whom the principle of equal pay has been breached, even without the application of any discriminatory criterion (i.e., e.g. gender, age, union membership, nationality), may pursue claims on similar principles to those of discriminated employees. This means that the provisions adopted in the process of implementing the Directive will also be able to strengthen the situation of, for example, a female employee who discovers that she is paid unequally compared with a female colleague (and not just a male colleague) doing the same job with the same employer. This will apply by analogy to male employees who are compared to their male colleagues.