The logic of making compensation transparent is that it becomes harder to pay people unfairly when salaries are open to public scrutiny. A new study supports this argument with data.
Tomasz Obloj of HEC Paris and Todd Zenger from the University of Utah’s business school compiled the salaries of almost 100,000 US-based academics in eight states over a period of 14 years. Their findings, set to be published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour later this year, show that pay transparency had a big effect on both pay equity—how fairly the academics were paid, particularly in regards to gender—and on pay equality—how similarly the academics were paid compared with their peers, writes Quartz.