‘Women are always a bit more intelligent than men’

March 8 is International Women’s Day. swissinfo.ch asked passers-by in canton Ticino, in Italian-speaking Switzerland, whether women in Switzerland were treated the same as men, in which areas, and where there’s still room for improvement. 

Switzerland was one of the last countries in Europe to give women the vote – in 1971. Forty years later, women were in the majority in the seven-person Federal Council. 

Equal pay for equal work is a constitutional requirementExternal link in Switzerland. However, according to the most recent dataExternal link, women earned almost 20% less in the private sector and almost 17% less in the public sector than men. 

The question of whether parliament should use legal measures to compel employers to meet the obligations in the 1995 Act has been hotly debated over the past few years. Last month parliament sent the Federal Council back to the drawing board after it completed a review of a bill that would require companies with more than 100 employees to conduct and publish a pay equity analysis every four years.