April 10 marks Equal Pay Day this year in the U.S, and it's not exactly a day of celebration, signaling as it does the number of days a woman has to work in 2018 to equal the salary of the average male worker in 2017 — 100 days of extra female labor, for those keeping score. The day is different in every country, because every country has a different pay gap based on gender. But while women earn less than men all over the world, some places are ... well, less bad than others.

According to a newly released report:

BELGIUM HAS THE LOWEST WAGE GAP BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN FOR FULL-TIME WORKERS OF ANY COUNTRY IN THE EUROPEAN UNION.

That gap has also shrunk significantly — it's now 1.1 percent, less than a third of what it was in 2007. Compare that to 10.5 percent in notoriously gender-aware Sweden or 19.5 percent in the U.S., and it's worth asking what Belgium is doing right. The answer: institutionalizing pay scales. Rather than allowing raises — or the lack thereof — willy-nilly, and at the whim of managers who somehow just happen to see men's work as worth more (thanks, patriarchy!), Belgium has gone hard on setting pay scales via collective bargaining agreements across industries, meaning men and women with the same job have to be paid the same amount.