Pay secrecy: Why some workers can't discuss salaries
Transparency around salaries can arm marginalised workers and close the wage gap. But in the US, many workers still can't talk about pay.
Hasnain says:
"Ricardo Perez-Truglia, associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, points to Denmark, where the government required mid-sized companies to share information about the pay gap between men and women. Soon after, data shows the gaps at those companies got smaller. “In Canada, there was a similar mandate for academics,” he adds. “What happened was the gender pay gap for faculty positions in Canadian universities shrunk from 10% to, like, 9%. It wasn’t a magical solution, but it moved things in the right direction.”
It’s likely, Perez-Truglia hypothesises, that the simple act of forcing companies to go public is enough to make them re-evaluate their pay scale. “The leadership is thinking: this looks really bad, and I’m worried the employees will be demoralised if they found out. Or it might leak, and it’ll be a scandal, and we’ll lose clients and it’ll be terrible. So, as soon as they’re mandated to release the information, they start giving raises and trying to fix the problem.”"
Posted on 2021-07-17T18:56:54+0000