The article is light on details, so hopefully I can help out as an Icelandic speaker. I'm only just familiarizing myself with this now.<p>It was already illegal to have unequal pay for the two sexes and other protected classes in Iceland. What's being changed here is mostly that the burden of proof is being shifted around.<p>Now organizations starting with 25 employees (and more requirements kick in at 250) need to have some sort of process for how they manage promotions, and implement pay scales that they can demonstrate to the institute of equality are conducive to the outcome of equal pay.<p>If they fail to do so they can start getting daily fines until they fix their processes.<p>So this is essentially an attempt to fix corporate governance through compliance before issues of equal pay arise, providing companies more rope to hang themselves by making them produce an audit trail of potential incompliance, and giving the government the power to fine companies for what it sees as structural problems, without having enough proof to pursue specific cases of unequal pay.<p>Edit: I misread the number of employee requirement. It's being phased in with companies with 250+ employees needing to be compliant by December 31, 2018, then each year in steps of 150-249, 90-149, until companies with 25-89 employees need to be compliant on December 31, 2021[3]<p>1. <a href="http://www.althingi.is/altext/146/s/1054.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.althingi.is/altext/146/s/1054.html</a><p>2. <a href="http://www.stadlar.is/thjonusta/nyjustu-frettir/stadlamal-frettabref-stadlarads/2017/06/jafnlaunastadallinn-ist-85-um-hvad-er-hann-og-til-hvers.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.stadlar.is/thjonusta/nyjustu-frettir/stadlamal-fr...</a><p>3. <a href="http://www.jafnretti.is/jafnretti/?D10cID=ReadNews3&ID=1404" rel="nofollow">http://www.jafnretti.is/jafnretti/?D10cID=ReadNews3&ID=1404</a>
Do two people doing the same job, with the same skills and the same experience get paid differently because of their gender? Its something I've never seen in my professional life in the UK.<p>I've seen reports where men earn more if you take the entire working population in to account, but that seems more based on the jobs done rather then the respective genders.
On the face of it, the title is incorrect; lots of other countries have had laws against gender discrimination for a long time (e.g. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Pay_Act_1970" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Pay_Act_1970</a>). The article doesn't really give enough details to understand why this case is apparently unique.
So if a man tries to negotiate a higher salary he'll be told no because it's illegal? What if a woman tries?<p>In most workplaces at the higher levels everyone is essentially doing their own specific version of a particular job. Two people might share the same title and job description but what they actually <i>do</i> can be very different and some people are simply more valuable than others. This kind of legislation seems to be enforcing a drone mentality, i.e. everyone is equal and does exactly what they are told, no more, no less.
Equal pay is an interesting topic, but it's a tough one. For example, in tennis, the prize money at grand slams is equal for both genders, yet the men play more tennis (and arguably at a higher level). The rationale often cited is that both genders are being pushed to their limit in their respective groups. By that logic, should anyone less naturally capable at a particular job (but giving it their all) be paid the same as someone more talented who is also giving it their all? It would be interesting to hear people's views on this!
I've been involved in a couple tech-oriented recruiting companies. There are 2 related problems making this more nuanced than what is visible at first sight IMO.<p>1) In many countries it's normal for companies to keep the salaries secret so employee A has no idea what employee B gets. Even Employee A is an utter slacker but good with selling themselves, A will generally go further. (There is a strong relation to success/leadership positions & Dunning-Kruger). Being honest about equal pay would mean companies have to be transparent about their pay-grades (kudos to those who do and not threaten to prosecute employees when they discuss this internally).<p>2) Women are less likely to either suffer from Dunning-Kruger. Nor are they as easily prepared to <i>"fake it, until they make it"</i> (as their male counterparts). I've seen this both as a lifelong engineer and in my countless interviews with applicants. Women tend to be more honest upfront about what they know. There are probably articles/blogs that confirm this though.<p>This is something companies need to incorporate into their applicant screening. Considering how idiotic most interviews are still run (whiteboard coding, creation of artificial stress in the interview, etc ...) I have little hope. If we want to make it fair we need to rethink hiring. (which is easy to say when the whole world is pushing for more automation within HR[1][2], with <i>[2]</i> being especially questionable since an interview isn't just for companies getting know you but also for you to assess your prospective future employer. Not much of a good first impression at all if the interviewer is literally a f<i></i>*ing bot, is it?<p>We need to discuss not just gender-equality but ageism and quite a number of other problems which I believe are rooted in transparency of HR processes & on-boarding.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/06/13/using-big-data-to-analyse-your-personality-and-character/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/06/13/using-big-da...</a>
[2] <a href="https://ideal.com/ai-recruiting/" rel="nofollow">https://ideal.com/ai-recruiting/</a>
I am mostly interested how this will be implemented.<p>How do you isolate differences that may arise due to different individuals being of different value to the company for one reason or the other.
I don't know what the statistics for Iceland are, but at least in the UK such regulations would, on average, help men in their 20's more than women.
A genuine and pure gender pay gap doesn't makes much of any economic sense. Imagine a company is able to hire women for x% less than men. And we assume these women are absolutely identically, if not superiorly, skilled. What would happen? Unless you think corporations are big into missing obvious opportunities to reduce labor costs, you'd suddenly have companies approaching near 100% women. Companies are already actively working to marginalize and cut the costs on labor as much as possible.<p>I think identity politics is getting somewhat out of control. Imagine you look at the pay balance between short and tall individuals, gender adjusted. It would be substantially in favor of the taller. Does this mean it's inherently discriminatory and that we need to start getting government to pass 'height gap' laws?<p>Perhaps the pretentiousness of social science is more at fault. The adjusted wage gap is supposed to compensate for every single factor in an employee's value and weight it perfectly fairly. That, I think, is beyond absurd. Even at the most fundamental level in that an individual's job title is rarely indicative of what they actually do. 'Senior Programmer A' and 'Senior Programmer B' are often going to be taking on vastly different responsibilities, even at the same company. Operations are not finely greased machines with each cog operating in its exact designated way. Individual differences are what result in one person starting at a low level and spending the rest of their life there, and another starting at a low level (with similar qualifications) and working at top level operations 8 years later. And at some snapshot in time you'd see our second person seemingly receiving disproportionate compensation. Well that's because they were doing a disproportionately better job.<p>This is not to say that there's no inefficiency in companies such that meritorious workers get left behind, or similarly that less capable workers get promoted. But, excepting cronyism, these tend to be inadvertent and undesirable inefficiencies. Horrible ideas like Ballmer's stack ranking are all just desperate efforts to try to resolve this inefficiency. It costs money and it hurts product - nobody wants it. If a company thought that filling every single position they have with transgender transracial dwarves would increase their longterm bottom line by even just a few percent compared to the status quo, our transgendered transracial dwarves would suddenly be the hottest hires on the market.
I would echo what one Nordic poster wrote in a subcomment: Nordics see equality as both female and male thing. I would venture to add that <10% adjusted wage difference is negligible when girls in some countries (including mine) have 50% higher participation in university-level education and women have ~1000% higher success rate in child custody cases. Interestingly, the latter two stats are mostly or fully under government control in most countries, i.e. they are instituted.<p>The article also quotes Global Gender Gap Report, which lists countries with education dominated by female students as having 1.0 (perfect) score in education attainment. In other words, girls missing out on school is bad while boys missing out on school is okay.
This is such a terrible, terrible plan.<p>A lawyer's dream come true.<p>An employer has two choices: don't hire any women, or create a flat uniform compensation structure that can't possibly attract star performers. This only works for janitorial, fast food, and the like. This does NOT work for high skilled high value knowledge workers like lawyers, programmers, etc.<p>If you DO hire women, prepare to get sued. If you DON'T hire women, prepare to get sued.<p><smdh>
Surely you have men with the same title now, earning different amounts because they have different skill sets / value to the company.<p>Will this just get solved by creating more titles. Each salary bracket needs its own title..
I don't see how anyone could complain about this. Companies will simply create more titles and then better illustrate the skills needed to be promoted.
Should the title be "legislate," not "legalise"? I know it's copied from the source, but it still seems a bit confusing / misleading.