Pay transparency intervention and the gender pay gap: evidence from research‐intensive universities in the UK

Danula K. Gamage, Georgios Kavetsos, Sushanta Mallick and Almudena Sevilla

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This study investigates the impact of a pay transparency intervention in reducing the gender pay gap in the UK university sector. Introduced in 2007, the initiative enabled public access to average annual earnings disaggregated by gender in UK universities. We use a detailed matched employee-employer administrative dataset that follows individuals over time, allowing us to adopt a quasi-experimental approach based on event studies around the intervention. We find that the earnings of female academics increased by around 0.62 percentage points compared to their male counterparts as the control group, whose earnings remained constant after the pay transparency intervention, reducing the gender pay gap by 4.37 per cent. Further evidence suggests that the main mechanism for the fall in the pay gap is driven by female employees negotiating higher wages, particularly among senior female academics.

JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2024-06-30
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Published in British Journal of Industrial Relations, 30, June, 2024, 62(2), pp. 293 - 318. ISSN: 0007-1080

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Journal Article: Pay transparency intervention and the gender pay gap: Evidence from research‐intensive universities in the UK (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:120850

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