Organisational Gender Pay Gaps in the UK: What Happened Post-transparency?

Melanie K. Jones () and Ezgi Kaya
Additional contact information
Melanie K. Jones: Cardiff University

No 15342, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Since April 2017 UK employers with over 250 employees have been required to publicly report their gender pay gap each year. We exploit this recent source of panel data on employer-level gender pay gaps to provide new insights for the established literature on the gender pay gap based predominately on employee information. More specifically, we explore the factors associated with changing organisational gender pay gaps in the period immediately following transparency. Consistent with information, reflection and pressure brought by the legislation, we find greater narrowing of gender pay gaps in organisations with a larger initial gender pay gap. Moreover, this relationship is magnified over time, consistent with gradual and longer-term adjustment. We further find evidence that interorganisational comparisons matter. For organisations with higher gender pay gaps than the average of their intra-industry comparators, lower comparator gender pay gaps are associated with further narrowing, suggesting relative comparisons enabled by transparency per se provide a channel through which the impact of the legislation operates.

Keywords: gender pay gap; pay transparency; equality legislation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J38 J78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2022-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-gen and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15342.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15342

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().