[jfaucett]

Am I the only one who thinks "institute of equality" sounds a little too Orwellian? The Minitrue newspeak scholar might proclaim: let there be no differences in income or outcome let the two words be one, I give you: uncome.

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.

[collyw]

"you can't fire a woman if she becomes pregnant and have to keep her position open for years"

It probably gets filled by another woman on a crappy temporary contract and lower wages.

[mafribe]

It's more than a little Orwellian!

For example Pol Pot and his henchmen justified their mass murder by accusing their victims as enemies of the "equalitarian state" [1].

It's interesting that this is being downvoted. Do the downvoters question the historical veracity of the connection between totalitarianism (such as Pol Pot's) and equality?

[1] Daniel Bultmann: Kambodscha unter den Roten Khmer

[evanlivingston]

I assume the downvoters take issue with your comparison between one of the worst genocidal regimes in history to one of the most unassuming, high functioning democracies by using only the similarity in a naming convention that the two different states used.

[nerdponx]

Slaughtering people is not "equality".

[jbob2000]

These regulations won't fix the main contributors to pay gap, as you have wisely pointed out. They are to fix and protect against the egregious cases of pay gaps, like the ones for TV broadcasters; The women literally sit beside the men and do the exact same job, but get half the pay.