REYKJAVIK, Iceland -- Iceland this week began putting in place a new law that requires companies and government agencies to prove they are paying men and women equally, positioning the country at the forefront of global efforts to minimize gender inequality.
The Equal Pay Standard, which was part of broader legislation proposed last March and passed in June, took effect Monday. It says that companies with 25 full-time employees or more must analyze their salary structures every three years to ensure that men and women are being paid the same amount for doing the same jobs. Then they must report back to the government for certification or face penalties that include fines.
While Iceland has had equal pay laws in place since 1961, the new standard is seen as the first time that the small and prosperous nation of about 340,000 has put in place specific steps to try to force companies to eliminate pay gaps.
"Of course, it has always been illegal to unequally pay men and women," Frida Ros Valdimarsdottir, the chairman of the Icelandic Women's Rights Association, said in an interview Wednesday. "But this is a legally binding tool kit."
In 2017, for the ninth year in a row, Iceland had the best overall score on the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, which measures the size of the differences between men and women in health, economics, politics and education in 144 countries.
For wage equality, Iceland ranked fifth in the report, which said that globally, the average pay for women in 2017 was $12,000, compared with $21,000 for men. In Iceland, women earned 14 percent to 20 percent less than men, according to government figures for 2015.
In 2016, women accounted for 48 percent of the elected representatives in Iceland's Parliament -- although that proportion declined to 38 percent in the subsequent election. Men are offered parental leave equal to women, and women have risen through the ranks of government. Icelandic law since 2013 requires private companies with more than 50 employees to have at least 40 percent women -- or men -- on their executive board.
But gender pay gap problems have stubbornly persisted, breaking into full view with public protests in October 2016, when women left their jobs at 2:38 p.m., before the official end of the workday, but at the time that many calculated they stopped being paid for equal work.
Business on 01/04/2018