The Labour Minister Says Women Are Still Dismissed for Being Pregnant, and the EU Law Meant to Help Is Three Months Overdue

Portugal's Minister for Labour said out loud on Friday what the complaint statistics have been saying for years. "We know that today there are still women who are not hired or who are dismissed because they are pregnant, or because they want to become pregnant," Rosário Palma Ramalho told a session on pay equality run by the CITE, the commission for equality in work and employment, marking International Equal Pay Day.

She added the category that is usually left out of that sentence: women on parental leave whose fixed-term contracts are simply not renewed. And she cited the CITE's own finding that requests for its opinion on dismissal or non-renewal for parental reasons fall on women ten times more often than on men.

The law Portugal has not yet written

The minister used the occasion to trail a bill transposing the European Union's pay transparency directive. It is still being prepared, and has yet to go to the Council of Ministers before reaching Parliament.

That is late. Directive (EU) 2023/970 gives a single date in article 34: member states were to bring the necessary laws into force by 7 June 2026. That deadline passed three and a half months ago with Portugal's transposition still at the drafting stage.

What the directive gives workers

The directive is unusually concrete for an EU instrument, which is why the delay has practical consequences rather than symbolic ones.

• Pay before the interview. Applicants gain the right to be told the starting pay or its range for the post, on objective, gender-neutral criteria, before the interview or in the advert itself.
• No salary history questions. Employers are barred from asking applicants what they earn now or earned previously.
• A right to know the averages. Workers may request, in writing, their own pay level and the average pay levels broken down by sex for colleagues doing the same work or work of equal value, and the employer has two months to answer. Employers must tell every worker annually that this right exists.
• No pay secrecy clauses. Contract terms preventing workers from disclosing their pay for the purpose of enforcing equal pay must be prohibited.
• A trigger at 5 percent. Where reporting shows an average gap of at least 5 percent in any category of workers that the employer cannot justify and has not fixed within six months, a joint pay assessment with workers' representatives becomes compulsory.
• The burden of proof shifts. In an equal pay claim, it is for the employer to prove there was no discrimination, and an employer that has not met the transparency obligations loses even the narrow exceptions to that rule.

Where the minister drew the line

Palma Ramalho was careful to say that pay transparency "does not mean the end of differentiation by merit", that those who work better should earn more, receive productivity bonuses and progress faster. What the policy targets, in her framing, is that progression criteria be transparent rather than flattened.

She also pushed back on treating parental support and equality policy as separable. Decoupling them, she said, would "continue to deepen the structural inequalities in the labour market between women and men". On the PSD proposal to extend parental leave to 180 days at full pay, conditional on the last 60 being shared equally between the parents, she called the alternative of simply raising the money without encouraging shared responsibility a false choice.

What this means for you

• The pregnancy protections already exist. An employer who wants to dismiss a pregnant worker, a recent mother or a worker on parental leave needs a prior CITE opinion. That mechanism is what generates the ten-to-one figure, and it is available now.
• The transparency rights do not exist yet in Portugal. Until the transposing law is in force, the right to ask for sex-disaggregated average pay is not enforceable here, however clear the directive text is.
• A directive past its deadline still has teeth. Where provisions are sufficiently clear and unconditional, individuals can rely on them against the State and public-sector employers once the deadline has passed.
• Keep the paper. Adverts, offer letters and any question about your current salary are the evidence that will matter when the reporting duties do arrive.

Our guide to working in Portugal sets out the contract and dismissal rules that apply in the meantime. The directive was agreed in May 2023, giving three years to legislate; Portugal used them and then some.