Iceland becomes first country to legalise equal pay | Hacker News Reader

Iceland becomes first country to legalise equal pay

aljazeera.com

62 pointsdacm92 comments

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

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.

"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.

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

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.

Slaughtering people is not "equality".

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.

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.

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.

How often do you encounter people with exactly identical skills and experience?

For that matter, how often do you know what your colleagues get paid? I'm used to environments where everyone is paid differently for essentially arbitrary reasons.

I've worked in environments where 6-8 people in a team have largely similar skill sets and all shared wage info. Not much difference besides how many end of year pay reviews they had stuck around to see.

My experience is personal and anecdotal so largely meaningless by itself hence the question to a wider audience

My experience has mostly been people get paid what they can negotiate before they accept the job. I've seen people with the same job title have around 25%-50% difference in salary.

Does this mean that negotiations in salary will go away ? It's not just salary either, some people might negotiate more holiday days, sick days, flexi-time etc than others.

Reddit banned salary negotiations because women were worse at negotiating.

Saying "women are worse at negotiating" is really not the whole story. Women are less likely to negotiate, and less likely to negotiate in ways that are most effective for men, but it's not because women are bad at negotiating, but rather that women are punished for attempting to negotiate. A woman who attempts to use the same negotiation strategies that are effective for men is likely to be considered abrasive, hostile, "not a team player", etc. and is more likely to be passed over for promotion, to be given an even smaller salary / raise, or to be dismissed altogether.

Women's approach to negotiating is effective and rational given the constraints, even though from the outside it may seem like women are bad at negotiating.

I can't tell if this would end up pulling down male salaries rather than pushing up female salaries?

Evidence is that as more women enter a field, or start gaining visibility, salaries typically go down. This is why people assume "women choose lower paying roles" - the reality is that people see any jobs that women do as less valuable and compensation over time adjusts to meet that belief.

I think it's just women entering the field double the workforce and thus bring down the compensation for the work.

Like lawyers and doctors?

It just results in negotiations over what job title you get. At least that is what I would expect.

Yes, there is both an adjusted and unadjusted gender pay gap.

I always wonder - if there is such a huge gap, why don't folks just employ women, since they're cheaper and do the same work?

Isn't that the question to be answered in order to really understand what's going on?

Otherwise I bet I can always find, for any company, a subset of people that are underpaid relative to the rest, be it related to age, gender, race, sexual preferences, employment history, ZIP code, whatever.

No, there isn't. The gap is between different professions, not intra-professional. Where it is intra-professional, men tend to work more hours, and women tend to preference conditions over monetary remuneration (i.e. flexibility over pay, extraneous benefits over direct compensation etc etc). Just to be clear, extra time off is remuneration, as are things like on-site day care centres, but they aren't ever counted in pay gap studies (that I have seen anyway).

Add to that that Lesbians make more than straight women[1] - and gay men less than straight men [2][3] - and there is a bit more at play.

The problem is that any time there is something men do better than women - like negotiate pay - rather than bring women up to the male standard (teach women to negotiate better), people want to hamstring men (no pay negotiation). Anti-worker policies and pro-gender policies are often indistinguishable, if only to me personally, and in my more cynical moments think this is a business conspiracy to deflate wages to female levels, not increase wages to male levels.

[1] http://bigthink.com/dollars-and-sex/what-explains-the-lesbia...

[2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-232X.2009....

[3] https://joeclark.org/gaymoney/findings/

It's possible to pay everyone equally - especially when you just pay everyone less.

If you disclose what everyone earns at every level, it's easy to then let all your employees pull everyone hold themselves accountable to the same level.

A bit like crabs in a bucket...

There isn't a huge gap, not for the same job/title combination (there are cases where the gap does exist for the same job, but it's typically less than 10%). The gap widely most widely reported, the 70% figure, is primarily caused because of the genders holding different jobs, where the average pay for female-dominated jobs is less than the average pay for male-dominated jobs.

So... this is light on details into their analysis, but Laszlo Block [formerly of Google - where I work fwiw], claimed "In 2015 we added 8,214 employees to Google. And the women we hired, on average, received a 30 percent bigger salary increase upon joining the company, compared to men."

If you accepted his claim that Google does pay genders equitably, then this would indicate a large pay disparity outside of Google.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/04...

> If you accepted his claim that Google does pay genders equitably, then this would indicate a large pay disparity outside of Google.

Or it would indicate a successful outreach program at Google for women by which they were successful at getting qualified women not currently working in tech to apply; this doesn't necessarily imply a like-duties gender pay gap.

Could it indicate discrimination against men at Google?

There's a lot of variables which are not being taken into account there. If you hired a person from outside SV, and another from within SV, you immediately have a 40-50% difference in salary increases. Or, if you hire one person out of an advertising company and another out of a software company, the difference will be quite large.

It's also a bit of a weasely statement - to quote Penn & Teller, they are lying with numbers - since it doesn't mention the current difference in wages.

10% adjusted is pretty large. Even sub-10% usually works out to a couple of thousand each year.

Yes, it's large, but it's also only practically visible when you can see all of the wages for all companies. Pay gaps between individuals in the same company - regardless of gender - can be much larger than 10%, since your wage (in the US) depends more on your wage at your last job than your actual skill level.

Perhaps it is due to "family costs" being carried disproportionately by women.

Leaving early to pick up kids, staying home when kids are sick, etc. Even though typical gender roles are becoming less typical, they may still result in differential output from the perspective of an employer.

Thomas Sowell (a while ago) showed a dramatic difference in salary between all women, and women who had never married, suggesting that a huge component of the pay gap was due to household and family expectations.

I imagine there is more recent research on this exact theory, but I'm not aware of it.

Perhaps the same biases that might influence career progression/pay-rise discussions could also influence hiring decisions?

Though I agree with your secondary assertion.

The belief that a woman with the same experience, skill, etc. is a worse performer would lead to a lower salary for women. That's the whole point of contention.

And we should probably let go of the idea that markets are rational.

You have to be careful, though. It's possible to control for too many variables such that your set of confounders itself is a predictor of sex. This is a technique I've seen used by people who try to deny the existence of a pay gap. It's FUD.

> set of confounders itself is a predictor of sex. This is a technique I've seen used by people who try to deny the existence of a pay gap.

This doesn't seem invalid? If for example 'wanting to spend more time at home'/'cares about team fit more than salary' is a predictor of gender, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be excluded from analysis.

What we care about is whether the pay difference is because of people treating women unfairly. If a different trait causes lower salaries in both men and women, but is more common among women, the problem is not a gender pay gap.

This is what I'm talking about:

http://www.separatinghyperplanes.com/2014/12/no-you-cant-con...

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/9/5597392/fancy-math-cant-erase-t...

The second article I vaguely agree with, except that the fact that pay gap exists isn't really interesting - what is interesting is why it exists.

For example suppose women on average don't care about money as much as men do, and take jobs with different benefits (like more free time). In such a situation, you would observe a gender pay gap. But the pay gap wouldn't be bad, or something that we need to fix. It would just be a difference in preferences, and a woman who does care about money as much as an average man could expect to earn as much as a man.

The article itself talks about how a significant part of the gender pay gap is the higher willingness/better fit of men to take dangerous, difficult, but well paid jobs in natural resource extraction. This... sounds like not a problem to me?

The unadjusted paygap is still caused by sexism.

That needs to be shown. There are many ways an unadjusted paygap might exist without any discrimination being involved - for example simpson's paradox.

gender disparity can be because a female colleague might not ask for a pay rise as readily as a male.

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Pay_Act_1970). The article doesn't really give enough details to understand why this case is apparently unique.

>makes Iceland the first country in the world to legalise equal pay between men and women.

It wasn't legal before?

>A new law making it illegal to pay men more than women has taken effect in Iceland.

>makes Iceland the first country in the world to legalise equal pay between men and women.

Weird writing here by ALJ. The differences between illegal, decriminalized, legal, and mandated are important. I think we in the US have grown to learn the differences a little better lately due to marijuana. It's illegal Federally, some states have decriminalized it, and some states have completely legalized it; no states have yet to mandate marijuana use.

Good point! If we carry over this use of "legalized" to "legalized marijuana", it means you are obligated to consume it under penalty of law.

I think they’re trying to use “legalise” to mean “put legal structures around”. Probably they meant “legislate”?

I interpret this to mean men have no legal recourse when their employer lowers their salary to match women's.

This will obviously disincentivize men from working as hard and lower productivity.

This language seems like an attempt to give a positive spin to more regulation.

Disclaimer: I'm am all for equal pay. We just might disagree on the best way to get there, but that's healthy right?

I think the difference is now you have to prove your innocence.

I guess the author meant legislate

So if a man tries to negotiate a higher salary he'll be told no because it's illegal? What if a woman tries?

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 do 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.

I guess the difference is in the assumption: Iceland assume a gender wage gab but no gender competencies gab. This assumption is also advantageous for men: Iceland has an equal system for men wrt. paternaty/maternaty leave. Furthermore we can also expect that nursing and kindergarten teaching professions will be easier for men to get into than is the case now. Lastly, there is also an ongoing debate about stay-at-home fathers (A consequence is that the Nordics are doing something about a _very_ deep assumption that women are better emotional providers than men).

In the Nordics (I am Danish) we increasingly talk about _gender_ equality as on objective thing, where both men and women have their problems. Though on the international scene gender equality means women's rights. Therefore this angling of the article.

Still waiting for the equality measures to hit those who don't have kids for whatever reason.

We always seem to end up doing extra to compensate for maternity/paternity leave.

That is a very interesting conversation, although OT. But it is interesting to think about whether there should be an alternative for those not wanting kids such as getting the leave anyways to use on whatever.

On the other hand there might be reason that we should give incentive to give birth to more kids.

More than enough people in the world, I see no reason to encourage more.

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!

The reason they are paid the same in tennis is that they bring in approximately the same revenue via sponsorship, ticket sales, etc. Women's tennis is basically as popular as men's at this point.

However, this is not the case in professional basketball, soccer or even golf. In all three cases, the men's leagues far outperform the women's in terms of getting revenue from the marketplace...and the commensurate salaries / prize purses reflect this. The US Womens Soccer team made a big deal about this recently, but when you look at the income produced by the men in professional leagues vs. women's leagues, there are stark differences.

I don't think that's true in the slightest. Men's tennis is much, much more popular across the board! That's actually why guys like Novak Djokovic were complaining!

It looks like in 2005 and 2008, revenue was similar. It's diverged since then.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/606439/tennis-atp-and-wt...

2007 was also the first year that Wimbledon (the last holdout of the four majors) paid the same to men and women victors.

It seems psychologically hard to regress from that benchmark, even if in recent years overall revenue has once again diverged.

And in non-majors, the pay disparity has returned, reflecting the differences in revenues:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/sports/tennis/equal-pay-g...

Money is a measurement of value that one group or individual assigns to something else. In employment, you're paying for the value an individual provides to a company - not how hard they try. If somebody's giving it all they have and are putting out less value than people who are half assing, then you would be be obligated to relieve the person giving it their all. They've reached their potential and there's just not much there, whereas your less incentivized employees are putting out just as much with a fraction of their potential.

This is also the reason I think things like participation trophies are likely doing more harm than good. Life is and likely always will be competitive. And in competition it doesn't matter how hard you try - in the end the victory is decided by achievement alone. Stephen Hawking is not highly regarded because he's a scientist working against all odds, but simply because he's a phenomenal physicist. If he had been perfectly healthy, he would have still achieved great regard - though perhaps excepting the living Hollywood biopic. Ultimately his merit does not come with the subtext 'for somebody with such a condition' but unconditionally.

how is this downvoted? Unbelievable

Unfortunately people on HN now down vote to show they disagree, rather than just for offensive or stupid remarks. It often means insightful comments that are a bit against the grain fall into the abyss, never to be seen again.

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.

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).

2) Women are less likely to either suffer from Dunning-Kruger. Nor are they as easily prepared to "fake it, until they make it" (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.

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 [2] 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*ing bot, is it?

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.

[1] https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/06/13/using-big-da... [2] https://ideal.com/ai-recruiting/

I am mostly interested how this will be implemented.

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.

Indeed. If you equalise pay between men and women, then either (a) you have to equalise pay among all employees for the same work, or (b) you throw merit-based salaries out the window and mandating paying more to one gender than the other for the same work.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

A lawyer's dream come true.

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.

If you DO hire women, prepare to get sued. If you DON'T hire women, prepare to get sued.

<smdh>

The WEF report.

https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report...

http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2017.pdf

Surely you have men with the same title now, earning different amounts because they have different skill sets / value to the company.

Will this just get solved by creating more titles. Each salary bracket needs its own title..

That's exactly how I think it will be solved, or more people shift to become contractors.

If the high performers aren't compensated properly, the ones that a company needs the most, they will leave because they have options.

Great, more compliance.

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.

how do sales bonuses work under this system?

Should the title be "legislate," not "legalise"? I know it's copied from the source, but it still seems a bit confusing / misleading.

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