Peru's Equal Pay Law (Ley 30709): Mandatory Job Classification, Persistent 25% Wage Gap

Peru's Congress passed Law No. 30709, prohibiting remunerative discrimination between men and women, in November 2017; its regulation (Supreme Decree No. 002-2018-TR) took effect in March 2018. The law requires private employers to build objective, bias-free structures of job categories and functions, document salary policy, and value positions using criteria unrelated to gender — methodological guidance was later issued through Ministerial Resolutions 243-2018-TR and 145-2019-TR.
Compliance is supervised by the National Superintendence of Labour Inspection (SUNAFIL), which can sanction employers that fail to maintain the required classification and pay-transparency records.
Peru's national statistics institute (INEI) tracks the outcome the law targets through its Encuesta Permanente de Empleo Nacional. Between April 2023 and March 2024, INEI found men earned a monthly average of S/1,898.1 against S/1,420.4 for women — a 25.2% gap that widens to over 36% outside Lima and reaches roughly 50% in Cerro de Pasco. This is only a modest improvement on the roughly 28% gap INEI reported around the law's first year (2018), and represents real, continuously measured outcome data rather than a one-off estimate.
Peru is included here as a cautionary case: a well-specified legal mandate with genuine enforcement infrastructure and sustained government measurement, whose primary target outcome — closing the gender pay gap — has not materially improved six years after entry into force.

Read the full analysis: https://larepublica.pe/economia/2024/09/22/brecha-salarial-se-mantiene-por-encima-del-25-segun-inei-589460