A New Law in Iceland Has Made it Illegal for Men to Get Paid More than Women
Dust off your passports: Iceland has officially become the first country in the world to legalize equal pay.
On Janurary 1 the progressive nation made headlines when its parliament—composed of roughly 50 percent women, it must be said—passed a law prohibiting pay disparity between men and women doing the same work.
According to a report by Al Jazeera, the new decree requires all companies and government agencies with 25 or more employees to “obtain government certification of their equal-pay policies.” In short: Effective immediately, businesses in Iceland are required to present proof of wage equity among their employees, and failure to do so runs the risk of criminal misconduct and being slapped with significant fines.
“Women have been talking about this for decades, and I really feel that we have managed to raise awareness, and we have managed to get to the point that people realize that the legislation we have had in place is not working, and we need to do something more,” Dagny Osk Aradottir Pind, a member of the Icelandic Women’s Rights Association, told Al Jazeera.
The newly initiated legislation brings Iceland just one step closer to reaching its ambitious goal of total pay equity by 2020. While it may not be all that surprising to hear that the liberal island country, located in the North Atlantic Ocean and composed of over 320,000 people, has implemented another attempt to bridge its longstanding wage gap (the nation has been ranked as the world’s most gender-equal country by the World Economic Forum for the last nine years, after all), the new law ultimately ensures a major win for women.
Your move, USA.