An average job description these days reads something like this. Duties: Everything from editing short films to creating pivot tables in Excel to wowing clients with interpretative dance! Hours: Every single hour in the day. Qualifications: 15 years in this field, plus a PhD. Compensation: Haha, why would we tell you that? Nah, you’re going to have to waste your time filling in a ton of paperwork and going to a bunch of interviews before we’ll let you in on that little secret. For now, all we can say is that it’s “competitive”. But not so “competitive” that we’re keen to advertise it.
As anyone who has ever looked for a job knows, companies can be maddeningly cryptic about their compensation packages; it’s pretty rare to see a salary range in job postings. But that’s starting to change. There is a growing body of evidence that salary transparency is a powerful tool in closing the gender and racial pay gap, and there’s increasing pressure around the world for employers to start being more open about what they pay people. The EU, for example, is currently mulling a groundbreaking proposal that would mean large employers would have to provide salary ranges on job ads and workers would have the right to request pay data broken down by gender and job level.
Across the Atlantic, there’s a similar fight for pay transparency. Last year, New York City passed a major new law that would require companies with more than four employees to list the minimum and maximum pay the employer “in good faith believes” it will pay. That law was supposed to come into effect this month but, at the very last moment, it got postponed until November.
Why the delay? Well, you’ll be glad to know that it’s because corporations just want everything to be fair and right. They have all our best interests at heart. In one of the most stunning examples of disingenuous corporate nonsense I have ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot of corporate nonsense) a coalition of NYC business groups complained to the city council that salary transparency requirements would hurt diversity efforts. According to the letter these jokers drafted: “In the context of achieving diversity goals, the posted maximum may be significantly higher than the historical salary ranges, creating dissatisfaction in the workforce.” These people have the gall to argue that companies are falling over themselves trying to give “diverse hires” massive pay packets and salary transparency laws would hinder these valiant efforts because all the non-diverse people would get upset. This, I can’t stress enough, is utter BS. You just need to look at the gender pay gap to see that it’s BS. To reiterate, a lot of research shows that the gender gap dramatically shrinks when employers adopt transparent pay practices. Weaponising diversity to try to undermine an initiative that would almost certainly help non-white, non-male candidates is vile.
I’m not saying that pay transparency is entirely without its problems, mind you. There are pros and cons to it, like everything else in life. While transparency is good, it’s always possible to have a little too much of a good thing. In Norway, for example, you can easily look up tax data and see what your neighbours or friends are earning and how much they have paid in tax. People were so fond of doing this that, at one point, the practice got dubbed financial or tax porn. There was reportedly even an app that let people create leaderboards with the highest and lowest earners among their Facebook friends. Nevertheless, I would rather deal with too much information than the current information asymmetry that exists between companies and candidates. There are far worse problems to have than “tax porn”.
• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
