André Spicer: UK equality watchdog wants workers to see colleagues' exact pay
Gender-gap reporting shrank the gap 19 percent by curbing men's raises, Danish transparency cut wages across the board
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A women’s equality protest organised by Care International in London. Photograph: Avpics/Alamy
theguardian.com
André Spicer
theguardian.com
Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission has proposed that workers be able to request the pay, bonuses and other perks received by their co-workers, arguing that openness will shrink a gender pay gap that still leaves UK women earning about 6.8 percent less than men. André Spicer, writing in the Guardian, suggests checking what the transparency already in force has actually done before extending it further.
The record is instructive. Since 2010, UK employers with more than 250 staff have had to publish their gender pay gap; a US study found the requirement reduced that gap by 19 percent — not by lifting women's pay, but largely by curtailing the growth of men's. Universities, obliged since 2007 to report everyone paid above £100,000 a year, saw a small relative gain for women, and mostly for the highly paid ones, who used the published figures to negotiate better packages.
Denmark's transparency laws cut in both directions. Men's wage growth slowed, women's edged up, and overall wages fell — people produced a little less and were paid a little less to produce it. One measurable improvement did appear: fewer women were prescribed antidepressants after the laws came in. Occupational sorting did not move at all; transparency set out the average wage of every occupation, and men kept entering engineering and finance while women kept entering nursing and teaching.
The mechanism that has actually narrowed the gap works by holding wages down rather than by raising them — and Spicer warns that individual-level openness, where the comparison is the person at the next desk rather than a statistic, is where the side effects surface: workers left demotivated, resentful and likelier to quit.
For European readers the question is not abstract. The EU pay transparency directive extends the same logic across the union; the EHRC's proposal is its individual-level version.
Denmark's laws lowered wages across the board and changed nobody's occupation. That is the experiment the EHRC now proposes to run on individual payslips.