On January 1, Iceland law declared it illegal for employers to have salary discrepancies between sexes. In short, it's now illegal to pay a women less than they would a man for the same job.
Iceland becomes the first country to enact an equal pay mandate, but it's a move that has been progressing there for some time. According to the World Economic Forum, Iceland has been ranked the most gender-equal country for the past nine years.
"We need to make sure that men and women enjoy equal opportunity in the workplace,” Thorsteinn Viglundsson, Iceland's Equality and Social Affairs Minister, said back in March 2017, when the law was first announced. "It is our responsibility to take every measure to achieve that."
According to Al Jazeera, employers that have at least 25 employees must now "obtain government certification of their equal-pay policies." If a company fails to pay a woman the same salary as they do their male employees they will face fine penalties.
"The legislation is basically a mechanism that companies and organizations...evaluate every job that's being done, and then they get a certification after they confirm the process if they are paying men and women equally," Dagny Osk Aradottir Pind, a board member of the Icelandic Women's Rights Association, told Al Jazeera.
Senator Bernie Sanders applauded Iceland's historic step for women's rights on Facebook, saying, "We must follow the example of our brothers and sisters in Iceland and demand equal pay for equal work now, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality or nationality. As we fight back Republican efforts to revert women’s rights to second-class, it is important to not lose sight that our real goal is to move forward and expand women’s rights."
In the U.S., women have almost non-existent protections when it comes to equal pay. The American Association of University Women reported that only eight states have strong equal-pay protection laws, while two states have zero protections.