Sonja Ýr Þorbergsdóttir, chairman of BSRB, has spoken RÚV that there is still a huge issue with the gender pay gap that needs to be addressed.
It was reported that women who have completed a master’s degree usually earn almost ISK 100,000 less than men with a regular degree.
The chairwomen told the news agency on average, men earn 29% more than women and Sonja says: “We are facing a complete stagnation in equality issues as there has been no real progress recently. Women with a primary school education have a similar total income as men who have only completed primary school, but in rural areas men have a higher income. “
“We are stagnating in equality issues.”
The main reason for this huge income difference is that data was given incorrectly in the beginning. It has not been possible to correct the error value underlying the salaries of large women’s classes.
“I doIf it is given incorrectly in the beginning and the wage development in each wage agreement is similar between the sexes, then the error is always there, “says Sonja.
Sonja also believes that one of the reasons for the gap is that many of the jobs that women could choose were not valued in society many years ago. Although the view of society has changed, wages have not.
These career choices have a major impact, as does power in general, as women are also less likely to be elected to management positions than men.
Coronavirus has highlighted the importance of certain jobs.
Sonja believes that little progress is being made in gender equality in Iceland, despite the fact that Iceland is doing well compared to other countries.
Sonja is, however, optimistic about how the COVID-19 epidemic has emphasized how many jobs women do rather than men.
“One can now feel before the coronary heart disease epidemic that all the nations of the world are discussing this. Now the spotlight is on the importance of these jobs, the front-line people, as the vast majority are women and are in the health or care professions and in schools. “
The gap is in both the private and public sectors.
“We see a big difference in the total salaries of men and women. There is often a smaller difference between the basic salary, but when you look at overtime and other salaries that are added to the basic salary, the gap increases significantly, “says Sonja in the interview with RÚV.
When asked to explain this further, Sonja told the news agency that classes where women were in the vast majority were more in the public labor market and where they worked according to rates in the wage agreement and had little chance of wage increases.
“In jobs where men are in the majority, there is generally a greater chance of raising wages. There seems to be more scope for raising men’s wages than women, “says Sonja.
To turn around an unacceptable situation.
To reverse the situation that Iceland is in, various measures are needed to implement it. The first step is to simply acknowledge the problem and look at how women’s jobs are valued.
It must be acknowledged that women’s wages have been wrong from the beginning.
A working group was set up with representatives from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Social Affairs, trade unions and employers’ associations with the task of proposing measures to eliminate the gender pay gap in order to correct systematic underestimation of women.
Sonja considers this to be a very big step in the right direction and welcomes the fact that the government has declared that the wages of jobs that women work in have been incorrectly assessed.
Source: The Nordic Page