Pay Transparency and the Gender Gap

Abstract

We examine the impact of public sector salary disclosure laws on university faculty salaries in Canada. The laws, which enable public access to the salaries of individual faculty if they exceed specified thresholds, were introduced in different provinces at different times. Using detailed administrative data covering the majority of faculty in Canada, and an event-study research design that exploits within-province variation in exposure to the policy across institutions and academic departments, we find robust evidence that that the laws reduced the gender pay gap between men and women by approximately 30 percent. There is suggestive evidence that higher female salaries contributed to the narrowing of the gender gap. The reduction in the gender gap is primarily in universities where faculty are unionized.

Do Firms Respond to Gender Pay Gap Transparency?

“…In a recent paper, Baker, Halberstam, Kroft, Mas, and Messacar (2019) show that disclosing the wages of university faculty in Canada reduced the gender pay gap, driven primarily by universities where faculty are unionized. In contrast in this paper we provide evidence based on private firms.…”

Social Position and Fairness Views

“…One of our key contributions is to measure and compare perceptions and misperceptions of social position in different reference groups that vary by domain, size, and proximity to the respondent and to show their relationship to views on the fairness of inequality within these groups. Connected to our result on the perceived position within co-workers in the same firm, recent papers have analyzed the impacts on satisfaction and effort of within-firm or within-employer wage differences (Card et al, 2012;Cullen and Perez-Truglia, 2018a,b;Baker et al, 2019). Complementary to these studies, our new findings show that people care more about income differences within co-workers, as compared to other reference groups, and that they particularly strongly misperceive inequality and their own income position within this reference group.…”

Resistant Transparency and Nonprofit Labor: Challenging Precarity in the Art + Museum Wage Transparency Campaign

“…Moving beyond an understanding of transparency as an institutional demand, our analysis develops how transparency functions as a resistant communicative practice with potential for increasing worker voice and furthering the goals of collective resistance to precarious work. Previous research has often focused on how organizations share and control information (Baker et al, 2019; Sanzo-Pérez et al, 2017). As mentioned above, organizations largely refrain from sharing salary information, reluctant to relinquish their control over wage negotiations (e.g., Zenger, 2016).…”