Your employer is obliged to treat all employees according to the same principles and not to discriminate against anyone in terms of pay because of their gender. According to the German Pay Transparency Act (Entgelttransparenzgesetz), under certain conditions he must tell you which criteria and procedures are used to determine your pay and the pay for an equal or equivalent job in the company. He must also tell you how high this remuneration is in comparison (median value of at least six persons of the opposite sex).
You can make a request if you are

• Employee in the public sector and in the private sector,
• Civil servant of the federal government and public corporations, institutions and foundations subject to the supervision of the federal government,
• a federal judge,
• soldier,
• employed for the purpose of vocational training
• employed in homework or treated in the same way as such employees.

are.

It is important that your company has at least 200 employees. What exactly you can ask depends on whether or not your employer is bound by collective agreements or applies a collective agreement.
If your employer is bound by or applies a collective bargaining agreement, it must, for your job and the comparative job you designate:

• explain in detail the criteria and procedure for determining remuneration. If the respective remuneration components are regulated in the collective agreement or by law, a simplified answer is sufficient (but the collective agreement or statutory regulation must be stated) and
• determine the amount of the average gross monthly remuneration and for up to two separate remuneration components.
• The following applies to the specification of the comparative activity: The comparative remuneration is calculated from all employees of the opposite sex who are classified in the same pay group as yourself). The prerequisite is that 6 or more employees of the opposite sex work in the comparison group. Otherwise, you will not receive any information on the amount of the comparative pay for reasons of data protection.

If your employer is not bound by or applies collective bargaining agreements, it must:

• explain in detail the criteria and procedure for determining the remuneration for your job and for the comparative job inquired about (a simplified answer is not sufficient),
• indicate the extent to which the comparative activity is predominantly performed by one sex,
• if applicable, explain in a way that is comprehensible to you why your activity and the activity of the comparison group are not equivalent and relate the information to an activity that he or she believes to be of equal value
• if there are 6 or more employees of the opposite sex in the comparison group: state the amount of pay as the statistical mean (median) of all employees of the opposite sex performing the comparison activity.
• provide the answer in text form within 3 months.

In order to improve the transparency of pay structures, private employers with more than 500 employees are encouraged (but not required) to implement company procedures to review and establish equal pay. If it has conducted such a review procedure with the participation of the works council, your employer must inform employees of the results, for example at a works meeting or by publishing the results internally.

In addition, employers who are required to prepare management reports in accordance with the German Commercial Code and who generally have more than 500 employees must prepare a report on equal opportunities and equal pay for women and men and publish it as an annex to the management report in the Federal Gazette.
If your employer violates the equal pay principle, you can demand to be paid in the same way as your better-paid colleagues with the same or comparable jobs. According to the general principles of civil law, the employer is obliged to pay withheld benefits. If the employer is not prepared to do so, you can take legal action to enforce your claims. The information from the right to information can help you enforce your claims.