Iceland becomes first country to legalise equal pay(aljazeera.com) |
Iceland becomes first country to legalise equal pay(aljazeera.com) |
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
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.
It probably gets filled by another woman on a crappy temporary contract and lower wages.
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'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.
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.
My experience is personal and anecdotal so largely meaningless by itself hence the question to a wider audience
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.
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.
It wasn't legal before?
>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.
Disclaimer: I'm am all for equal pay. We just might disagree on the best way to get there, but that's healthy right?
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.
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.
We always seem to end up doing extra to compensate for maternity/paternity leave.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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>
Will this just get solved by creating more titles. Each salary bracket needs its own title..
If the high performers aren't compensated properly, the ones that a company needs the most, they will leave because they have options.
This will obviously disincentivize men from working as hard and lower productivity.
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...
On the other hand there might be reason that we should give incentive to give birth to more kids.
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.
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.
http://www.separatinghyperplanes.com/2014/12/no-you-cant-con...
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/9/5597392/fancy-math-cant-erase-t...
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?
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....
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
Though I agree with your secondary assertion.
And we should probably let go of the idea that markets are rational.