Author: Nera Monir Divan, Gender and Inclusion Advisor at UNDP

Today, on Equal Pay Day, we pause to reflect on a question that is often presented as simple: do women and men receive the same pay for the same job?

The reality is much more complex.

Pay is shaped long before a payslip is issued. It is shaped by who enters the labour market, which occupations women and men are concentrated in, who gets promoted, who has access to leadership, who can work full time, who takes career breaks and, importantly, who has the time to care.

This is where feminist economics offers an important lens. It asks us to look beyond what conventional economic measures count and to recognise the work that makes economies possible but is often invisible in them, particularly unpaid care and domestic work.

Our Gender Equality Barometer of Bosnia and Herzegovina makes this connection particularly clear. Women report spending 6–7 hours a day on unpaid work, while traditional expectations continue to place much of the responsibility for cooking, childcare and other household work on women. These are not simply questions about what happens inside the household. They shape what happens in the labour market.

When care is unequally distributed, women have less time and flexibility for paid work, career progression and leadership. When care services are limited or unaffordable, families absorb the cost, and women often absorb a disproportionate share through their time, careers and future earnings.

This is why equal pay cannot be separated from the care economy.

It also means looking beyond whether a woman and a man receive equal pay for an identical job. We need to ask whether work predominantly performed by women is valued equally, whether women and men have equal access to better-paid occupations and leadership, and how unpaid work shapes paid work.

Equanomics, UNDP’s approach grounded in feminist economics, brings these questions into economic policy and practice. It asks us to look at how economies can work differently, including how we value work, distribute resources and recognise the contribution of care.

And we are bringing new evidence into this conversation.

Together with the Agency for Gender Equality of Bosnia and Herzegovina, UNDP is preparing the first comprehensive Gender Pay Gap Study in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The study is coming soon and will help us move from assumptions to evidence, looking more closely at what lies behind the gender pay gap.

But measuring the gap is only the beginning.

Closing it will require more than correcting salaries. It will require looking at pay-setting practices, occupational segregation, career progression, leadership and, critically, how care is organised and valued.

So today, on Equal Pay Day, perhaps the question we should reflect on is not only whether women and men are paid equally.

It is whether our economy values their work, their time and their opportunities equally.

That is where the real conversation begins.