That’s because many organizations “anticipate higher scrutiny” and “respond more aggressively to improve gender pay equality, both in terms of the magnitude and type of response,” said the authors of the study published in Strategic Management.
The research looked at publicly available data on the compensation of 32,000 university employees working at 1,400 academic departments over a 24-year timeline, and showed a four-per-cent increase in salaries for females versus those in other provinces.
By using academic job categories to measure the result of the transparency, it was relatively easy because most roles in post-secondary institutions are similar and this makes it easy to calculate, said one of the researchers, Elizabeth Lyons, associate professor at UC San Diego in La Jolla, Calif.
“In some organizations, you might see someone’s salary but you might think, ‘I don’t know what that means for me because their job is just so totally different than what I would do,’ but within academia, jobs are pretty comparable.”
Solutions are here
These results show that by making salaries and compensation more transparent, pay equity might be achieved more quickly, according to another expert.