| 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. 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. 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. If they fail to do so they can start getting daily fines until they fix their processes. 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. 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] 1. http://www.althingi.is/altext/146/s/1054.html 2. http://www.stadlar.is/thjonusta/nyjustu-frettir/stadlamal-fr... 3. http://www.jafnretti.is/jafnretti/?D10cID=ReadNews3&ID=1404 |
In seriousness though, I think this might make more problems than it solves, but we'll see, hopefully it does what it is intended to do. The main problem as I see it, is that the vast majority of the pay gap is not due to evil corporations hating women and discriminating against them, but to a myriad of other factors, see this study by the European Commission: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/gender-pay-gap/c....
A lot of these regulations end up hurting women more than they help because they don't take these other factors into account. For instance, I live in Germany and a factor working against women in the workforce is all the regulations that make it so you can't fire a woman if she becomes pregnant and have to keep her position open for years while she takes mother's leave. There are some compensating laws that allow men to take some of the same leave options but still don't fully compensate for this disadvantage.
EDIT: Put this here to see what others think or are trying (in your companies, startups, etc). Another factor is the way in which individuality and ownership is rewarded through promotions etc. in company culture. Women (in the distribution) tend to be much more cooperative and work better in team/collaborative environments where its hard to determine who is responsible for the outcome (I can't remember the study but I think there was a You are not So Smart podcast on collective intelligence about this). Anyway, I think changing the structure and culture inside companies to be more accommodating / financially rewarding to collaboration and group success could be another more effective way to help close the pay gap. At least on paper, women outperform men by a good margin on collective intelligence tasks.