Women and men, on average, earn equal pay at Jamaica’s two largest airports, but that overall equity conceals imbalances at the operational, management, and executive levels, according to the Sustainability Report 2025 released by the Mexico-based Pacific Airport Group (GAP) this month.
GAP said it plans over the medium term to reduce imbalances by a further 20 per cent across the group.
“This plan not only ensures compliance with applicable legal requirements, but also strengthens our internal culture of equality and transparency,” GAP stated in the report.
Apart from legal and moral reasons, GAP said such a plan enables the company to objectively define employee benefits, promote competitive compensation practices, and ensure that “all salary management processes are conducted under principles of integrity, respect, and non-discrimination”.
GAP operates 12 airports in Mexico and two in Jamaica, at Norman Manley International in Kingston and Sangster International in Montego Bay. On average, Jamaica scores zero on the gender pay-gap scale — skewing neither in favour of men nor women. In Mexico, it skews in favour of women out-earning men, but even that’s complicated.
The disclosure in the GAP Sustainability Report offers a level of detail on gender pay gaps in Jamaica and Mexico, breaking out figures by operational front-line and back-office workers, management, and executive level rather than reporting a single, blended number.
“The wage gap includes average figures from Mexico and Jamaica and was calculated by dividing the average base salary of women by that of men,” the report states, adding that the figures were calculated in accordance with the UN Women methodology for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Front-line and back-office operational staff in Jamaica showed the starkest split in the entire table: women in those roles earned 19 per cent more than their male counterparts on average, the largest differential in either direction anywhere in the disclosure. That advantage flips at the management level, where men earned 6.0 per cent more than women in both base salary and total compensation. It flips back at the executive level, where women earned 1.0 per cent more than men in base salary, before flipping once more, narrowly, once other financial incentives were added, leaving men ahead by 1.0 per cent in total executive compensation. Blended across all three tiers, the average base-salary gap for Jamaica nets out to zero.
A negative result in the report’s methodology indicates women earn more, while a positive result indicates men earn more.
Mexico tells a mixed story. The country-wide average base-salary gap for Mexico landed at negative 4.0 per cent, indicating women out-earned men on average once all levels were blended. That was driven by women out-earning men at the executive level by 14 per cent in base salary. That metric, however, shifts to 15 per cent in favour of men out-earning women at the management level. Operational employees in Mexico showed a 6.0 per cent gap favouring men.
GAP, listed on both the Mexican and New York stock exchanges, said it has built pay equity into its broader human-capital strategy. The previous 2024 Sustainability Report indicated that, group-wide, pay was skewed 22 per cent in favour of men, but did not disaggregate the figure by territory.
The company has also set itself a formal target to narrow the gap further. Under its newly launched 2025-2029 Sustainability Plan, GAP commits to “reduce the gender pay gap by 20 per cent across organisational levels”.
Over the year, Jamaica’s workforce shrank slightly, from 299 employees in 2024 to 295 in 2025, a decline of 1.0 per cent. Jamaican staff still account for roughly 8.0 per cent of GAP’s 3,754 total employees. Two unions represent Jamaican staff: the Union of Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Personnel, covering 14.3 per cent of the country’s workforce, and the Trade Union Congress, covering 19.3 per cent — together accounting for roughly a third of GAP’s Jamaican staff, compared with a blended GAP-wide unionisation rate of 26 per cent.
Beyond pay, GAP’s Jamaican operations also featured prominently in the report’s climate-resilience disclosures, following Hurricane Melissa’s passage through the island last October. The Category 5 storm forced a precautionary suspension of airport operations across Jamaica “following directives from aviation and civil protection authorities”, the report states, with Kingston’s Norman Manley Airport resuming within roughly 24 hours to handle humanitarian relief flights, while recovery at Sangster in Montego Bay was more gradual. The disruption was financially material to the Group: GAP disclosed that, in the first nine months of 2025, its Jamaican airports represented 11.0 per cent of total passenger traffic but 8.8 per cent of operating profit, and said the storm “underscores the importance of integrating climate resilience considerations into airport infrastructure management and GAP’s investment planning processes”.
GAP’s Chief Executive, Raúl Revuelta Musalem, framed the year’s broader push as a structural one rather than a one-off. “In 2025, GAP drove a strategic evolution of its sustainability approach, marked by the development of the new 2025–2029 Sustainability Plan,” he wrote in his message accompanying the report, adding that the company “conducted a salary competitiveness and labour cost structure analysis, enabling us to assess the group’s market positioning and its impact on competitiveness” as part of its talent strategy for the year.
steven.jackson@gleanerjm.com
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