Iceland Reheats Century-Old Soviet Ideals in its Move to 'Pioneer' Equal Pay

On March 8, International Women's Day, Iceland triumphantly announced that it would eliminate the gender gap in salaries by 2022 by obliging employers to produce tangible proof that their personnel are being given equal pay for work of equal value, regardless of their gender, ethnicity or sexuality. According to the Icelandic legislators' pledge, all employers with a staff of more than 25 would be required to prove their commitment to the new gender equality mandates, the magazine Icelandic Review reported.

Despite the fact that Iceland has been repeatedly ranked among the best countries with regards to gender equality by various investigators, Icelandic women have been found to earn between 7 and 18 percent less than their male counterparts, on average, by the Icelandic Center for Gender Equality.

Icelandic Equality and Social Affairs Minister Þorsteinn Víglundsson admitted the time was ripe "to do something radical" about this issue. While some people argued that the law would impose unnecessary new paperwork, Víglundsson defended his cause, arguing that such burdens must be put on companies to "fight against injustice."

On October 24, 2016, thousands of Icelandic women stormed out of work at 2:38 pm in order to protest the gender wage gap outside parliament. The moment was not chosen arbitrary, as women's rights group calculated that women are working for free after this time each day.

Whereas equal wages might indeed be a landmark achievement for the minuscule Nordic nation of 320,000, its efforts are in no way groundbreaking in the grand scheme of things.

In fact, the very idea of equal pay was first introduced in the early Soviet Union, whose egalitarian working class ideology already manifested itself in its first decrees shortly after the 1917 October Revolution, when women were given an equal standing with men in all spheres of economic, political, social and cultural life.

In the subsequent age of rapid industrialization, the right to equal pay for women was guaranteed by Article 122 in the 1936 constitution, which also guaranteed a plethora of benefits, including maternity leave, free childcare through state-owned kindergartens and legal protection from overly exhausting and hazardous work. This also led to the fact that female participation in the workforce of the Soviet Union (around 90 percent) was much higher than in Western countries.

Of course, money wasn't everything in the Soviet system, where price controls often made access to goods and services everyone could technically afford hard to come by.

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