In Iceland, it is now illegal to pay men more than women.
Gooooo Iceland!!
As a company that champions women in the workplace, when we heard about this we wound up for some serious high-fives and knucklebumps.
On January 1 of this year, Icelandic legislation went into effect requiring companies with 25 or more employees to submit proof for government certification that women are getting paid the same as men.
“The legislation is basically a mechanism that companies and organizations… evaluate every job that’s being done, and then they get a certification after they confirm the process if they are paying men and women equally,” Dagny Osk Aradottir Pind, a board member of the Icelandic Women’s Rights Association told Al Jazeera, in this article about the move. “It’s a mechanism to ensure that women and men are being paid equally.”
Rules encouraging equal pay have been on the books for some time now, but they’ve never really been enforced. Now, if a company can’t or doesn’t submit proof of pay parity, or they’re flat out not equally paying men and women employees, the company will face steep fines.
It opens up the discussion of global gender parity, an ongoing conversation and one that is far from being put to rest.
