Is Iceland “the first country to require equal pay for women”?

So says the headline of this NPR article, “Iceland Plans To Become World’s First Country To Require Equal Pay For Women,” which reports that

“Gender equality benefits all of us,” Iceland’s Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson said on International Women’s Day, as his government works on a law to require companies to show they pay men and women the same salary for the same work. . . .

The law, which is believed to be the first of its kind at the national level, would apply to all companies with more than 25 employees, Benediktsson said. Companies would need to undergo certification every three years to ensure that their pay policies follow the rules.

So, in the first place, companies are required to certify, rather than merely being subject to lawsuits if employees complain about discrimination.

But it’s more than that:  the Huffington Post (alone about the news articles I checked) includes a further detail:

The government said it will introduce legislation to parliament this month, requiring all employers with more than 25 staff to obtain certification to prove they give equal pay for work of equal value.

In other words, rather than simply requiring that companies certify that, for instance, male and female job grade 4 actuaries have, on average, equal salaries, this is a resurrection of the “comparable worth” concept that I thought had vanished, the notion that you can assess any two jobs for their “value” to compare salaries across occupations — deeming secretarial work and garbage collection, for instance, to have the same “value” by assigning a value for skills required, difficulty level, and so on.

Various of the news articles reference Minnesota, and, indeed, that state does have a “comparable worth” law as pertains to state employees — though it’s called a “pay equity” law, which masks the way it functions.  A 1994 report (there’s not much available that’s more recent – though there’s an overview by Think Progress from 2014) lists some examples:  a delivery van driver and a Clerk Typist 2 were rated as being “comparable,” as were a Grain Inspector 2 and an Administrative Secretary.  Another example showed a Senior Groundskeeper being rated significantly lower than an Administrative Secretary, at 160 vs. 173 points, based on 4 categories of “know-how”, “problem-solving”, “Accountability for actions and consequences” and “working conditions” — note that physical strength seems to have counted for nothing, and the 16 point differential for working conditions meant that this component was given very little weighting.  The report also states that the net effect of implementing the system was an increase in payroll of 3.7%, and that no male-dominated jobs were given pay cuts.

Of course, even a comparable worth law can’t erase pay differentials between men and women, as long as men and women make different decisions about careers and work hours.  Even if individual private employers are required to set salaries based on comparable worth doctrines, that won’t change the fact that companies specialize in different goods and services, and pay levels in different industries differ.  And if men are, on average, more aggressive about career advancement, then men will move into higher-pay jobs more frequently than women.

That being said, the culture of Iceland seems to be rather different than either the United States or Europe.  Reports are that marriage is disappearing, with individuals pairing up, breaking up, and re-pairing, with (reportedly) no ill effects on the children.  I’ve read (though I can’t find any nice linkage right now) that there are other cultural differences — that they are significantly more indifferent to religion, that they value their heritage quite highly and, I suspect, are more bonded together by that shared heritage because of relatively small rates of “outsiders” (see the CIA Factbook; only 6% are not Icelandic by ancestry) and their geographic isolation.  Iceland also defaulted on its post-2008 crash debts, to the cheers of progressives, and with seemingly few ill effects, though it seems they were rescued in part by a tremendous growth in tourism that brought in significant new revenue just when it was most needed.  For reasons that aren’t clear to me, Iceland maintains no military force but is still protected under the NATO nuclear umbrella.  (Maybe there’s a general consensus that it means little as no one would want to invade Iceland anyway?)  A more disturbing piece of the culture is that reports claim that Iceland does not have any new Down Syndrome births, due to universal screening and a universal agreement that these babies should be aborted — which may seem to have nothing to do with “comparable worth” but speaks to a society with an overwhelming consensus on the topic (whether fully voluntary or not), and suggests that whatever sort of legal mandates and social engineering may be necessary to produce identical pays, may succeed in Iceland due to its culture.

Image:  “Secretary at Work”.  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASecretary_at_work.jpg; By Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Thousand Oaks, California [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons