11 ms·

Iceland becomes first country to legalise equal pay

62 points by dacm 9y ago

pebers 9y ago
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 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.
JMCQ87 9y ago
Great, more compliance.
gruez 9y ago
>makes Iceland the first country in the world to legalise equal pay between men and women. It wasn't legal before?
- lukasm 9y ago
  I guess the author meant legislate
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  I think the difference is now you have to prove your innocence.
- Amorymeltzer 9y ago
  >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.
  - rmellow 9y ago
    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.
  - didgeoridoo 9y ago
    I think they’re trying to use “legalise” to mean “put legal structures around”. Probably they meant “legislate”?
    - chillingeffect 9y ago
      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.
- rmellow 9y ago
  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?
swarnie_ 9y ago
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.
- pjc50 9y ago
  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.
  - swarnie_ 9y ago
    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
- irpapakons 9y ago
  Yes, there is both an adjusted and unadjusted gender pay gap.
  - dmichulke 9y ago
    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.
    - falcolas 9y ago
ulzeraj 9y ago
> Iceland, an island country in the North Atlantic Ocean that is home to approximately 323,000 people, has a strong economy. > strong economy
- relate 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you are implying. Iceland suffered a hit in the 2008 crash, but has since almost fully recovered. GDP Iceland over time (2017 missing): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=IS&year_high_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... GDP per capita comparison (Iceland ranking 6th): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?year_high_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?year_hig...
callesgg 9y ago
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.
- taneq 9y ago
  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.
krona 9y ago
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.
avar 9y ago
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 http://www.althingi.is/altext/146/s/1054.html 2. http://www.stadlar.is/thjonusta/nyjustu-frettir/stadlamal-frettabref-stadlarads/2017/06/jafnlaunastadallinn-ist-85-um-hvad-er-hann-og-til-hvers.aspx http://www.stadlar.is/thjonusta/nyjustu-frettir/stadlamal-fr... 3. http://www.jafnretti.is/jafnretti/?D10cID=ReadNews3&ID=1404 http://www.jafnretti.is/jafnretti/?D10cID=ReadNews3&ID=1404
- jfaucett 9y ago
  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/causes/index_en.htm 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.
cup-of-tea 9y ago
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.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  This is valid for any private company/corporation, normally only government employees have some sort of 'matrix' salaries (this position with this years of experience -> salary). Iceland is definitely not the first country to implement this on paper, but for non-governmental employees I can't see any real way to enforce this. Everybody within our teams, for all the employers I ever worked, had the salary they were able to negotiate. Meritocracy, the best system there is and ever will be.
- madsbuch 9y ago
  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.
  - collyw 9y ago
    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.
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
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-data-to-analyse-your-personality-and-character/ https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/06/13/using-big-da... [2] https://ideal.com/ai-recruiting/ https://ideal.com/ai-recruiting/
ramblerman 9y ago
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..
- MollyR 9y ago
  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.
a_imho 9y ago
The WEF report. https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report-2017 https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report... http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2017.pdf http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2017.pdf
osrec 9y ago
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!
- bkohlmann 9y ago
  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.
  - osrec 9y ago
    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!
    - bkohlmann 9y ago
      It looks like in 2005 and 2008, revenue was similar. It's diverged since then. https://www.statista.com/statistics/606439/tennis-atp-and-wta-tour-revenue/ 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-gender-gap-grand-slam-majors-wta-atp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/sports/tennis/equal-pay-g...
indubitable 9y ago
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.
tabeth 9y ago
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.
wrsh07 9y ago
Should the title be "legislate," not "legalise"? I know it's copied from the source, but it still seems a bit confusing / misleading.
guy98238710 9y ago
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.
joeblow9999 9y ago
how do sales bonuses work under this system?
joeblow9999 9y ago
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>

62 points by dacm 9y ago

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 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.

JMCQ87 9y ago

Great, more compliance.

gruez 9y ago

>makes Iceland the first country in the world to legalise equal pay between men and women. It wasn't legal before?

lukasm 9y ago
I guess the author meant legislate
UncleEntity 9y ago
I think the difference is now you have to prove your innocence.
Amorymeltzer 9y ago
>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.
- rmellow 9y ago
  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.
- didgeoridoo 9y ago
  I think they’re trying to use “legalise” to mean “put legal structures around”. Probably they meant “legislate”?
  - chillingeffect 9y ago
    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.
rmellow 9y ago
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?

swarnie_ 9y ago

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.

pjc50 9y ago
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.
- swarnie_ 9y ago
  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
irpapakons 9y ago
Yes, there is both an adjusted and unadjusted gender pay gap.
- dmichulke 9y ago
  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.
  - falcolas 9y ago

ulzeraj 9y ago

> Iceland, an island country in the North Atlantic Ocean that is home to approximately 323,000 people, has a strong economy. > strong economy

relate 9y ago
I'm not sure what you are implying. Iceland suffered a hit in the 2008 crash, but has since almost fully recovered. GDP Iceland over time (2017 missing): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=IS&year_high_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... GDP per capita comparison (Iceland ranking 6th): https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?year_high_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?year_hig...

callesgg 9y ago

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.

taneq 9y ago
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.

krona 9y ago

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.

avar 9y ago

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 http://www.althingi.is/altext/146/s/1054.html 2. http://www.stadlar.is/thjonusta/nyjustu-frettir/stadlamal-frettabref-stadlarads/2017/06/jafnlaunastadallinn-ist-85-um-hvad-er-hann-og-til-hvers.aspx http://www.stadlar.is/thjonusta/nyjustu-frettir/stadlamal-fr... 3. http://www.jafnretti.is/jafnretti/?D10cID=ReadNews3&ID=1404 http://www.jafnretti.is/jafnretti/?D10cID=ReadNews3&ID=1404

jfaucett 9y ago
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/causes/index_en.htm 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.

cup-of-tea 9y ago

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.

saiya-jin 9y ago
This is valid for any private company/corporation, normally only government employees have some sort of 'matrix' salaries (this position with this years of experience -> salary). Iceland is definitely not the first country to implement this on paper, but for non-governmental employees I can't see any real way to enforce this. Everybody within our teams, for all the employers I ever worked, had the salary they were able to negotiate. Meritocracy, the best system there is and ever will be.
madsbuch 9y ago
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.
- collyw 9y ago
  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.

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago

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-data-to-analyse-your-personality-and-character/ https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/06/13/using-big-da... [2] https://ideal.com/ai-recruiting/ https://ideal.com/ai-recruiting/

ramblerman 9y ago

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..

MollyR 9y ago
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.

a_imho 9y ago

The WEF report. https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report-2017 https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-gender-gap-report... http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2017.pdf http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2017.pdf

osrec 9y ago

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!

bkohlmann 9y ago
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.
- osrec 9y ago
  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!
  - bkohlmann 9y ago
    It looks like in 2005 and 2008, revenue was similar. It's diverged since then. https://www.statista.com/statistics/606439/tennis-atp-and-wta-tour-revenue/ 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-gender-gap-grand-slam-majors-wta-atp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/sports/tennis/equal-pay-g...

indubitable 9y ago

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.

tabeth 9y ago

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.

wrsh07 9y ago

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

guy98238710 9y ago

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.

joeblow9999 9y ago

how do sales bonuses work under this system?

joeblow9999 9y ago

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>