I have always felt that job ads should include salary information. The main reason is not to waste anyone's time. Often a narrow salary range or a clear link between requirements and salary are much more informative than a job description. I have experienced to apply to a job opening and go through one or more interviews only to find out that the company is actually hiring for a more junior position than the ad copy implied.
A second reason is to avoid discrimination. Applicants that feel disadvantaged, even if they are actually qualified, may hesitate to negotiate for a higher salary in the same way that a other applicants would. The consequence is that they start with a lower salary. This applies specially to women. Plenty of research shows that they are less likely to negotiate their salary.
Research[1] suggests that pay transparency leads to lower average salaries because employers avoid paying higher wages to any one employee to avoid costly negotiations with others. The effect is small, around 2%, and it disappears with increasing degree of unionization. In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
When hiring I don't have a narrow range in mind, it can be 50% or more. I look at the individual and make a judgment call on their impact to the business. For software we don't have a widget factory where employees are easily substitutable.
I've tried the opposite, paid everyone the same. But there were clear differences in ability and more importantly outside options. It became a problem when it came to retention and the business didn't have the ability to overpay everyone to keep the top performers.
Then you should have more defined roles, even if organisationally they're the same, i.e. there's very clear expectations of differences in salaries (and business impact) between junior, mid and senior developers.
My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?" precisely because I've run into your first point earlier in my career. I'm not even particularly salary-driven (doing interesting, valuable work is far more important!) but it's the best indicator that the role is pitched at the right level for me.
From an employer's point of view, there's also the avoidance of future unpleasantness if (or, rather, when) it comes to light that some staff are paid significantly less than their peers.
Responsible employers don't need mandatory salary disclosures to do the right thing here but, sadly, not all employers are responsible so this sets a common baseline and ensures everyone plays by the same rules.
> My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?"
The concept of range isn't useful to ask though. If you say my range is $x to $y, all the company hears is that you'll work for $x. The $y part is irrelevant. Learned this early in my career, where every "$x to $y" invariably became an offer for $x.
So now in my initial intro call with any recruiter I just tell them my minimum, fully knowing that becomes the maximum offer. If they're ok with that we can keep talking, if not, that's cool, we both avoided wasting time.
That's why it's important to ask the recruiter, rather than wait to be asked.
That way you can respond to their range with something along the lines of "that sounds roughly what I was expecting", "okay, I'd probably be looking for the top end of that", "that's perhaps a little lower than I was expecting - is there enough room for flexibility for us to be able to continue talking?" or whatever. It's too early in the conversation to be doing a full salary negotiation, you're just making sure the role's at the right level.
There's a big problem with employers writing a senior-sounding job ad for a junior role - the salary range is a much more accurate indicator than a job description.
That said I think Jury is still out on pay transparency mostly because there isn't that much practical data. The EU has been navigating it for a few years but research is still ongoing.
One paper (which is more focused on pay gap reporting, which is longer implemented and seems to have limited impact) suggests salary disclosure in job ads actually increases wages.
It's definitely obvious that internal salary transparency will a) act to normalise salaries over the long term and b) generally depress salaries. But disclosure at the job as stage is less clear.
People intuitively like the idea of reducing inequality and hate the idea that the fact they make less money than the other guy might be entirely rational.
We will invent narratives to protect our ego and will happily keep other people down (including ourselves) instead of confronting this.
"He just got promoted because he's more outgoing, he's not more talented than me!"
Ok let's assume thats true. But if your job involves spending 40 hours a week with someone (more than your family), it turns out humans value being around charming, outgoing people. Is this wrong or is it the market accurately assessing relative value in the context of the actual work (collaborating with other humans)?
About 30% of modern economics is dubious studies that demonstrate that things which hammer profits are Bad For The Little Guy.
See also: hiking the minimum wage (possibly the most obvious example of academic corruption), rent controls, taxing the rich, etc.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary ones are 1) economists also respond to incentives and those think tank jobs pay really well and 2) prestige in the industry is also a commodity - a commodity which can be bought and sold. The level to which money talks in this industry is reflected by the wages - always higher than all other humanities.
As an example the freakonomics guys popularity are to popular economics what k pop is to music: a slick, highly refined, marketed product from a superbly well oiled marketing machine.
My point is that we should be able to distinguish between the studies that are dubious and the studies that are solid but go against out assumptions. And if our assumptions are that that economists are just protecting corporations, we'll end up rejecting claims that might be true, and end up with policies that sound like they protect the little guy but are actually harmful.
Sure, ideally you should dig deep. I did that on a lot of the minimum wage papers and discovered just how deceptive and misleading they were trying to be - mostly using carefully crafted data and assumptions which were patently unrealistic. Sometimes they would smother those wrong assumptions with incredibly elaborate math.
Not everyone has the time, energy or patience to do that though. Journalists certainly don't and the general public is more inclined to be drawn in by a nice clickbaity story that makes them feel smarter than their friends (which is the market segment freakonomics services).
Point being if you were to make an assumption, "pop economist says that popular thing thing that is bad for profits is bad for you too is probably bullshit" is actually a fairly safe one.
The first thousand USD/mo a person earns has a different meaning to them than the second thousand, and the third thousand, and so on with diminishing returns. The point of minimum wage should be that no one is constantly fighting for their life, because a person in that situation is usually a harm to everyone.
After a bitter experience early in my career I _never_ “negotiate” the salary. When that conversation comes up I ask for the range they have for the position. If they are not willing to give that, it’s a huge red flag for me. It means that either the company _doesn’t have a range_, or they’re hellbent on hiring the cheapest person for the job. In both cases I don’t want to work there anyway.
In general, a free market only works (even in theory, let's not even get started on the practice of it...) when _there is no assymetry of information_. Otherwise it's just fraud, one party mispricing things because the other party knows something they don't.
It's why we require public companies to disclose their finances. How could a person, even in theory, know whether to invest otherwise? It's why we require sellers of houses to deliver an independent inspection report. Etc etc.
The converse is also why HFT companies make more money than croesus.
>In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.
That theory rests on the assumption that your salary is based on how good you are at your job. But if that were the case then corporate life wouldn't be full of people complaining "my boss is an idiot and yet (s)he makes ten times what I do".
I'll argue that money goes to those who are best at internal politics, with perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance.
> perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance
The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales ... even then the correlation was not 1
> The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales
Maybe I've been lucky to work for moderately reasonable companies, but I've never seen that.
For example in my current company, yearly raises are directly tied to performance rating. And while there is subjectivity in the rating, it is basically impossible to squeeze in a high performer rating for someone who doesn't do anything even if I wanted to (which I don't). It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
The correlation will never be a perfect 1.0, but it is closer to 1 than to 0. Low performers end up getting low to nothing in raises, and the high performers get a multiplier that increases their raises.
I'm pro salary transparency, but both things are true and OP should not be downvoted:
- Some employee salary discrepancies are inefficiencies due to humans sucking at rationally evaluating other people
- Some employee salary discrepancies are legitimate outcomes of value produced relative to other employees
The problem is the more we create policy assuming the first one is true, we eliminate everyone in the second category (however small or large that category), making the economy less efficient. I would argue pay transparency isn't one of those policies however, and in fact would lead to more efficiencies.
That said, all interventions have consequences, and less growth and higher inefficiency from cutting tall poppies is indeed a risk. As someone in Europe, our total lack of productivity growth is leading to collapsing governments, underwater social entitlement systems and mass riots. These are serious issues that should be discussed and not dismissed outright with downvotes.
Now you've permanently handed power to employers to claim every year is "a tough year" and pay people less, while tricking people into uprooting their lives and taking jobs under the pretense of "the salary is low but you usually get a crazy big bonus!"
Let me guess, your next rebuttal:
> "But then we'll create more policy to try to stop the downsides of the first policy we created!"
Now you have a patchwork of 48,000 regulations all collectively harming the efficiency of the economy and creating all sorts of weird un-intended consequences and loopholes for low-trust people to game instead of rewarding honest people for doing the right thing like you intended.
My actual response "But then we will have to deal with biases, discretion and management collecting their 10mil bonus by giving the juniors a pittance"
The flip side of course is people who actually work in bonus heavy revenue generating roles - where the impact is easy to measure - tend to leave if they are not valued and take their clients with them.
Things work a lot better in a healthy economy with competition and low friction for people to move around - exploitation blossoms when people are trapped by economic circumstances
How well correlated are the highest paid employees to the best employees, though? My guess would be that salary correlates strongly with self-belief, charisma, and negotiation skills
This is the lump of labour fallacy, right? Companies don't actually have to have fixed labour budgets; indeed ideally firms should be always willing to hire/retain a worker at a salary less than that workers marginal revenue product, as this is profit maximising.
Companies can decide to do it however they want. They don't have to conform to a platonic ideal of a bureaucracy. A company expecting to grow its market share will give it's managers more leeway than one that's under financial difficulties.
What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.
I can imagine that this is the dynamic which for actual x10 developers makes flexible YC-style startups more appealing than rigid FAANG-level companies.
These very much tend to strongly correlate. You're definitely more confident in negotiating and counter-offering if you have 10x skill as your leverage.
That’s not at all the case. Five of us recently moved internally via a remapping and they gave us pay rises. I negotiated 15% more than the initial offer, everyone else took the initial offer. Roughly same ability.
Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.
Imagining this problem is just a sign that your company can't do pay grades or job titles properly. Or work out the concept called a "bonus".
The thing is, if you're rewarding performance through _process_ it ends up being more public and you have to have a written justification for it. Not just favouritism.
Cautiously pleased about this. Some companies in UK pay senior devs £30-35k. And some companies won't discuss that until v late in the process, while importing US-style multiround interviews. It's pretty silly when people get 3 rounds in, take time off work for the interviews, then find out their expectations are so far apart.
It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
It is your fault if you allow the recruiting process to get to the third interview without at least knowing if the salary range is acceptable.
If you lack confidence in talking money, here is what you say:
"I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer."
You might add:
"$120K is my minimum but I am really hoping to find a role at the higher end - $130K is what I'm aiming for, depending on the job."
If, after saying all this, you get lowballed, then you have good reason to be very annoyed, and express calmly but clearly that you have had your minimum salary on the table since the first phone call." At that point you withdraw from the process and go look for a job with a professional company.
This sounds great in theory. I've had a ranges that was very healthy on application, gone through a lengthy process including showing work examples and meeting the team to be offered below the bottom of the original offer - "We feel like this is a good starting sallary, we will review it in 6 months" - "The company has changed its investment direction so this is a revised number" - "We've created a new role that better fits your needs" etc etc...
This law will force them to actaully stick to a number.
Some recruiters get paid on commission, meaning after 6 months of you being in the role they get paid. Other internal recruiters don’t work that way so they have no incentive to get you in the door for a minimum term.
The law will make it visible how much a company values someone with those skills. Companies won’t advertise the salary though, they will advertise the range.
I have never applied to a job in the UK (or in USA), and wonder why you are being voted down. Is that not an appropriate question? Or will the employers and hiring managers not give answers?
They more than likely will not answer or will dodge the question entirely. This is so ubiquitous that if you decided to only go through processes that do answer this question, you might not get anything at all. In many cases when they do answer, it is a bold lie; and if challenged "who told you that range?", "well if you hit certain performance parameters by year three your total package may be x...", "that's for the senior position, we are offering you the standard position".
Do your due diligence and research companies that behave in this manner via platforms like Glassdoor. AI makes this process much easier. And always publicly call out companies that do this instead of sucking up.
You will basically have to be willing to walk away to get an answer other than "tell me what you're looking for and we'll let you know if you're in our range", which basically loses the negotiation. Most people are not comfortable doing that.
Also, large parts of the UK culturally have difficulty talking about money. (Exceptions are Yorkshire, which is proud of it's difference here, and (parts of?) Scotland). That's not going to change overnight, so making disclosure a legal requirement is a fair solution.
I'm in the UK and always ask about salary range and if the role is remote before I agree to do an initial interview. It saves everyone involved from having their time wasted. The first contact is usually a recruiter though, I don't mention pay and benefits in interviews.
It isn't uncommon to be given an acceptable figure, go through several rounds of interviews and end up with job offer but with a lower salary than initially agreed because the recruiter padded the numbers.
> You will basically have to be willing to walk away to get an answer other than "tell me what you're looking for and we'll let you know if you're in our range", which basically loses the negotiation.
No, it doesn't lose the negotiation. What makes you think so? Setting anchors and controlling the document is very powerful.
But yes, you need to know what you can get, and you need to be able and willing to walk away.
The suggestion that it's OP's/the candidate's fault jarred me a little. In my experience this is such a common situation in the UK that you could be jobless for much longer if you insist on early salary disclosure.
> I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer.
From the article, this self disclosure of range is part of the problem. People who have been given lower salaries in the past for discriminatory reasons may well low ball themselves if they offer up the range.
> It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
For me, being fresh out of university, I didn't really think to press on salary too much and was just happy to land a job. In my first job, I recall not knowing the salary until I got the contract and offer (luckily, it was surprisingly above average pay).
When I moved into the software industry, I started to realise my worth a bit more and job-hopped for 10-50% pay bumps on an annual basis for the first few years and just started chasing higher salaries and turning down interviews unless they were in my desired range.
I know many other engineers who never changed this behaviour (or were never taught to be more ruthless and know their worth) and were just happy to receive any increase in salary - and as a result had 10+ years in the industry and had utterly pitiful salaries due to their employer simply taking advantage - you'll never receive the same increase in pay by remaining loyal to a company versus job hopping. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing in the UK or what but this is the type of advice that should be given in schools more IMO.
Yeah, this is my experience too, trading up every couple of years (though sometimes I've taken a sideways or slight downwards step to broaden my experience or work for somewhere that I thought was interesting or worthwhile). I've had a couple of longish spells at companies, 7 or 8 years, and in both those cases I left because my pay wasn't keeping pace with the market or my growing responsibilities and management wouldn't budge. The irony being that at those places i was at my most valuable because of my institutional and political knowledge. I think companies greatly undervalue the benefits of long term employees.
Same here. You don't even know what you're worth if you keep working at the same company. And even then, if you don't know what you could ask, you will never know how much you're really worth.
Let's say you could command 100k/year but your first job is 30k/year and stay there for several years because you like the work environment. Then you'd go to the next company and ask for, I dunno, maybe 50k/year and think that's a huge bump. If you saw salary ranges for similar positions elsewhere you'd be more inclined to start looking around even if you were happy at your current employer.
Nowadays things are a bit more transparent in the tech world with stuff like levels.fyi (but you have to know about those), but I'm thinking it would benefit people in all fields.
> It is within your power as a job applicant to ask the salary range in the first phone call.
Sure, but the first phone call happens after you have already spent potentially hours putting together a tailored resume, cover letter, and 3 creative writing prompts about how you resolved a conflict with a coworker.
That's a pretty bad comparison. You aren't agreeing to work without knowing your pay. It's more like looking at a house before you know it's price.
Depending on your circumstances, that might be reasonable. If most people aren't quoting pay ranges and you need a job, not applying because of that isn't very smart.
I would make sure I knew the pay range before going through all the interview rounds, but not sending your CV in sounds too limiting to me.
Recruiters at big companies will be told to advertise the role within the payband (the min to max pay for that role at that pay band)
So if you see a top end number and think you’ll get that, you probably won’t it will be around the middle of the range.
At that point you go back to the recruiter and state that you would expect the top end of the range. They may agree with you but then keep in mind that may also impact your salary increase at the end of the year, meaning a smaller increase for you compared to your peers which over several years would even out and out you back in the middle of the payband like your peers. This is why the common idea is to jump roles every few years.
There are pros and cons of working with external recruiters, but that they will know (and be willing to disclose) the salary range is absolutely one of them, as they don't want their time wasted either.
> The European Union adopted pay transparency rules the following year, giving member states until June 2026 to implement them in national law.
That's the first I've heard of it, and I've seen plenty of job postings the past year for European companies where there was no salary indication. See for example the recent HN Who's Hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50338728
Does the law, as implemented in their local member country, state that they have to state the salary range on that sort of post. There are a number of possible loopholes I can think of depending on how their regulations are written: it is an international posting, it is an informal/prospective posting, the information is available on their site (which they may or may not link to) etc.
Also “in the last year” means only ~50% of that time is covered by when enforcement started.
Some countries have yet to pass any legislation too, this happens quite a lot if you look into past EU declarations, so companies there might be using that as a loophole to act as if not yet be effectively covered (in theory they could be taken to court over it, but that is can be complicated, or at least expensive, when there is no local legislation yet, so in practise it is far less likely to happen). What action will be taken by the EU to push things forward, I'm not sure, presumably there is some sort of fine for extended non-compliance? The question of who you are advertising to and where from can get a bit complex if you are a company in a member state that has not yet enacted anything, especially when you operate out of more than one territory.
Most of the jobs in that HN thread do give a salary expectation (though a few with a very wide range, which might be outside the rules, but they were US anyway so not covered), I don't think I saw an EU one in my quick scan that did not (at least one UK one, but again those are not currently covered by such rules).
Apparently, in France, the bill is not yet ready, and given the current state of legislative process, I don't think it's going to be ever voted before the next elections.
Again, member states miss European deadlines, but since it has no practical consequences, I don't see a why they would do it differently.
I wouldn't have been bothered if it where some exhaustive reform of the work law, but in practice it would amount to a couple of amendments. Probably could be drafted up in an afternoon.
Yes, companies indeed break the law all the time. Most of the time, nobody with any power gives a fuck, and in the rare cases where they do, the consequences tend to be comfortably inside the “cost of doing business” range.
Besides ‘salary disclosure’, one other law that really helps improve salary is to ban potential employers from asking candidates’ current/previous salary. This avoids potential employers from offering just marginally better than candidates previous roles…
I got this once. I was equivocating, and then the guy was like, well, you're gonna give us your P60 when you join anyway, so you might as well tell me.
I was like, okay, fair enough.
I played it completely wrong though. I should have just reframed it and said, well, I paid this, but you're not competing against my current employer, you're competing against Meta, who I'm also interviewing with this week.
Yep, the advice I always give people for this question is to respond:
"My current salary is xyz, but I'm currently interviewing with several companies, so my salary expectations are tied to what I'm worth in the market, not my current pay. My specific ask will change as interviews progress"
i don't know what a P60 is, but you are unlikely required to give them anything except background checks and proof of qualifications until the salary is decided and the contract is signed.
A candidate can just make up whatever number they want to respond though. Most candidates I interview usually say what they want to get, not the real number.
i'd also like to ban asking for a salary expectation. it puts you in a very weak bargaining position. also my expectation depends very much on the type of work i'll be doing. i'll accept a lower salary for a good job and work environment, but i won't know that until after some interviews.
I hope this will a real law, not the phony one passed here. They should literally exile from country the person responsible for that mockery. It goes something like this:
The salary range has to be included in job add or provided to job seeker at the latest upon signing the contract.
That entire sentence could be stricken out and nothing would change.
Feels like a law requiring prices on shop shelves. Isn't it self interest to put the salary in the ad? So much saved time. And probably more suitable applicants. I don't apply for a job without knowing the salary. Or via recruiters that tell you upfront (they usually do).
When I’ve raised this to a CEO that was bragging that he gives competitive salaries but can’t disclose it, he said that a person that asks for the range before the interview it’s in it for the money.
The only real reason companies don’t want to put salary ranges on job adverts is that it triggers difficult conversations with staff they have been taking advantage of.
There's multiple reasons companies don't want to publish salaries, but they almost all boil down to wanting to pay people as little as they can get away with
No, but people will just assume the actual pay is £20k and decide whether to apply for it on that basis.
As an employer that ruins one of the classic ruses that has been going on for a while: take someone through multiple interviews and then lowball the candidate who seems the most desperate.
If you believe in free market economics I think we can expect this to be a mess for a little while and then within a year or two it gets relatively efficient at dealing with the inefficiencies it’s targeting: younger people just not wanting to play the bullshit game where employers dangle generous starting offers, and then rug pull them to 2/3rds of that number; and to fix the gender pay gap (and the smaller reaching ethnicity pay gap).
What do you think the fix to the gender pay gap is relevant to this conversation?
There is no gender pay gap in 20s, 30s with several areas now favouring women. The mean pay gap is entirely due to the percentage of women in their 40s+ taking time off work for motherhood.
The paygap is just a measure of the number of women having children. What percentage should have children? If you want a zero mean paygap, the answer has to be zero.
A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
The paygap is just a dial which controls the rate of motherhood.
There is no "per job" paygap. Nor could there plausibly be. For if any group could be paid less to do the same work, someone en mass would be, thus lowering the pay for that work. (Its unclear how such a rich source of free output from 50% of the population could go untapped, systematically).
Though even if that logic isnt persuasive, there is no measured per-job pay difference at an individual level. The "pay gap" describes a mean difference in pay at population level -- when you control for total hours worked, it disappears.
We do already have this in the UK post partum, although there's also the ongoing matter of childcare, which judging by headcount at school pick-up time still leans heavily female today anecdotally.
Is it not possible to manage childcare around full-time jobs? Let's say dad takes the kids in at 8:45 then heads to work, while mum starts work at 7, finishes at 2:30 then goes to pick up the kids. School holidays complicate matters, but you have clubs and annual leave. And you can also both reduce working hours slightly.
That wouldnt "solve" the paygap, women still need to be out of the workforce for O(1yr) per child. That would be an "individual" pay gap of around 10% for a women who has two children.
Why is noramlizing a population statistic, like average pay, more important to you than motherhood?
I've never met a mother who wanted to be in work full time. What exactly do zoom meetings, email threads, and spreadsheets get you in life?
I'm not one to say "captialism has gone too far", but perhaps in this case at least, isnt it mad to force average labour hours to be the same across sexes "just because" ?
women who do not want to work are not forced to. this is about women who do want to work but are forced to take the full parental leave instead of sharing it equally with the father because men are pressured to not take any parental leave lest it affects their career.
the goal is to require men to take equal parental leave in order to remove that pressure and put women and men on a more equal position when it comes to children.
today women are considered a hiring risk because they might have children and take parental leave. if fathers were required to take parental leave as well, then the risk would be more similar for both.
In the UK it essentially is, one of the two parents can take the full parental leave. It does not have to be the mother. Guess who still chooses to raise their kid instead of creating shareholder value in bullshit jobs most of the time.
Demonstrably not true. One of the drivers of the legislation is to reduce the number of employment tribunals brought about for cases of pay discrimination where the overwhelming evidence is that women are paid less than men at every level of expertise and age.
We have the data on the average hours women work, it's ~1mo/yr less. We also know the pay gap, its 1mo/yr. The effect due to differential pay is a rounding error.
We can also do the simulation trivially using empirical data, women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career across male/female populations
The claim that the economy sustains a free markdown on 50% of the population's labour is mad. What force of nature is keeping a mass of businesses forming just hiring this cheap labour? Why arent there businesses booming hiring, en mass, women?
Either way, aside from that madness. The effect is, to a significant figure, entirely explained by working duration not differential pay.
And I've personally known no mothers who think the population of women is better served by reducing their part-time work, and having them work more.
> women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career.
And people wonder why professional women don't want to have children any more.
We've created a society which economically punishes people for having kids. I don't think anyone should be surprised that the fertility rate is declining.
The lifetime pay for a median UK worker @40yr @35k/yr ~= 1.4mil
The "cost" of two children, with above numbers, for "mean woman" is 20% of pay -- so she earns ~1.1m
Presented on a deathbed: would you have preferred to earn 1.4mil over your working life and have neither of your two children, or 1.1m and have both?
The question would seem an absurdity. Bearing in mind that 300k comes with a lifetime of zoom calls and emails, and not much else.
Now if you want to pay women to have children, that's a proposal I'd be open to -- it would reduce the pay gap by significant tax rises, and so on. Nevertheless, I've not met any mothers who wanted to work more nor would take the trade for 1.4 over 1.1 (this, of course, doesnt control for tax credits or welfare -- which both perform this redistribution anyway).
We don't have any real firm details yet, the pre-legislative consultation only closed last week.
However that consultation said this:
>We propose to introduce this requirement [pay transparency in recruitment] through a delegated power, enabling regulations to specify exact requirements. For example, the size of a salary range.
That’s as ridiculous as some of the job postings here with a range of $100K-300K. Without bounding the range in some way like you say, this does absolutely nothing.
In Italy this feature has become mandatory this summer and we've been observing some good patterns (companies that do not find anyone because the salary is too low compared to responsibilities). We have also seen interesting hacks, companies reporting from 20k to 150k for an intership position.
There are all kinds of reforms needed in that space; like whether a position is eligible for internal hire or not, requiring that a job posting must lead to someone being hired, making it illegal for jobs to be posted on fake foreign job sites in order to claim no native job demand exists as justification to import foreign labor, requiring a 100% visa employment tax on the fully burdened rate, making all executive bonuses taxable at 100% for any company that hires Visa/foreign labor, etc.
People will make out hiding salaries is some grand conspiracy, but if you've ever been on the other side of hiring, people just don't know.
Would you like to have to pin your salary on your CV? Probably you are hopeful you can get as much as possible. And employers look for a deal. It works both ways.
I agree that personally I'd prefer to see the salary on the job advert. But state meddling generally leads to unexpected outcomes.
>but if you've ever been on the other side of hiring, people just don't know.
I've spent my entire career on the other side of hiring and I've yet to encounter a single valid excuse for not knowing, and subsequently not advertising, a salary range. Before you hire, you need to know if you can afford to hire. If you know you can afford to hire, you know what you can afford to pay. It really is that simple.
Affordability is different to declaring your position at the outset.
For example, when I buy a used car or a house, I know what my budget is. But I'm not telling the seller that upfront. Because my budget does not mean I want to pay the top end of the budget. I'd rather pay below my budget if I can.
The only excuse for forcing employers to do declare is that you want to hold them to a higher ethical standard. Not because there's no reason to do otherwise strategically.
>Because my budget does not mean I want to pay the top end of the budget.
Yeah I get the whole "if we advertise a range, everyone will demand the top of the range" argument. Unfortunately, that assumption has never held true.
Few jobs won't have a market salary. I think for exec jobs there could be an exception here. You may want to pay one person double the other and even define different role for them. But for a welder or junior dev it should be easy to define and figure out.
Can we also make it mandatory to reply to a job application, even just an automated "sorry, your application has been rejected", so you know whether to keep considering that job?
Such laws do not really help in practice. Does a 60-90k range in EU, commonly given to engineering roles, offer any real guidance? A better system would be publishing the average salary for a similar role, but that would be a privacy problem for a low headcount team, or if the role doesn't exist yet... This is a really hard problem.
It's actually not hard at all, it's only a problem for companies if they fail to keep it secret. Norway has had their tax records public for ages https://www.weforum.org/stories/economic-growth/norway-can-s... and their society and economy seems fine, except they it's extremely easy for new grade to know what they can ask for.
The "complications" are basically employer and manager propaganda because the information asymmetry suits them better than people realising they are undervalued and leaving
Salaries being a public record does come with some downsides for employees.
For the low-paid, it can make it even harder to get credit, or a place to rent, and it can be used for other kinds of discrimination. For the highly-paid, service providers and sales people can use the information to increase the prices you pay and make negotiation harder.
More transparency in a society is for the better. This shouldn't stop at salaries. Why aren't service providers required to disclose what they charge others? Why aren't dentists, lawyers, surgeons etc... required to report their stats? All of those would break information asymmetry and make for better decisions all around and less scams.
your bank already knows your salary, and if they don't they are going to ask for it as a condition to give you credit. in some countries landlords ask for proof of income too. the less regulated these areas, the more likely that is going to happen.
Even better, grocery stores might make various discounts and promotions eligible based on whether you belong to a certain bottom percentile of income. That’s the holy grail of price discrimination („milk them for all they have”), which is now attempted to achieve only through imperfect means such as premium brands, up-sells etc.
Ranges are still somewhat useful. If they low-ball the upper bound, anyone expecting close or above the upper bound is unlikely to apply. So there is incentive to be honest about that end at least. But as an applicant (or current employee), knowing the upper bound the company is willing to pay for this position is useful information for salary negotiations (and to enable you to spend your limited time and resources in applying to well-paid jobs)
Obviously it's not perfect. But as you say, it's a difficult problem. And salary ranges are at least something
In my experience, they will offer a bit above the advertised minimum of the range. So if I wasn't happy with £60,000, I wouldn't consider that job, and I definitely wouldn't apply on the basis that maybe they'll offer £90,000.
That's fine though - As long as they're publishing the actual range that they like realistically pay someone, there's literally nothing wrong with that.
Not the reality in sectors that already do this, like the civil service, but it will cap the upper limit that people can negotiate to.
Even if the minimum does apply everywhere, it fixes the inequalities gap that is causing so much economic drag in the UK: white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies. If everyone gets the bottom of the band, at least everyone gets the same, and that’s been an important goal for multiple UK governments of different political stripes over many decades for reasons to complex to go into here (and no, it’s not “political correctness”, it’s far more complex than that).
I also don’t think it likely means average salaries come down, I just think it means the distributions narrow.
> white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies
I think this would be illegal under the Equality Act (which does not of course mean it doesn't happen), can you offer some examples or further reading?
I assume one day the racism and sexism in the commenter you're replying to will be addressed.
Until then, you are quite correct. The pay gap is not a feature of individual jobs, but a population effect due to women in their 40s+ not being in the labour force.
It is illegal in the UK to pay differently, and there are many high profile cases of this being enforced even to the point of absurdity (such as forcing councils to pay bin-men/trash-collectors the same as female office admin workers).
Likewise as the mean pay for women is ~1month/yr lower, the mean hours men work, as a population is ~1month/yr longer. Thus there is no pay gap once you control for hours worked.
Incidentally, the only way there could be no mean pay gap across both populations would be if no women had children. So a non-trivial paygap merely an indirect measure of the birth rate.
No. This claim relies on deceptive definitions of "exact same role".
Employment tribunals in the UK now regularly conclude that jobs which are clearly different are actually the same, essentially as a bung to women. For example, stating that working in a warehouse lifting boxes all day is the same job as working on a checkout till sitting on a seat, or that being a librarian has the same value as a guy collecting garbage. Being a bin man is much higher paid because it's a dangerous, dirty and low status job that people don't want to do, so the incentives have to be correspondingly higher to attract workers, but delusional left wing tribunals declare by fiat that they're the same as highly feminized jobs that are clean and safe.
This is causing chaos in Britain, for example in Birmingham where trash just doesn't get collected because the bin men went on strike:
> The council also says that the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer role does not exist at other councils, and that retaining the role opens it up to equal pay claims, since it is performed mainly by men.[2] In March 2025, the council declared a major incident after 17,000 tonnes of rubbish were left uncollected on the streets.
Look at the wider picture of unfair pay employment tribunals that are driving HMG to introduce this legislation and you’ll see the problem is real, systemic and decades old.
I have personally had to advise boards that their discussion of compensation adjustments to women of child bearing age are illegal, it is a rife and widespread practice and absurd.
There are two elements to women being paid less. Both exist, but they are deliberately conflated for reasons.
One is that women do get paid less for the same job on average.
The second is that jobs which women tend to do get paid less than jobs which men tend to do, either through different industries or through different opportunities.
It’s not as clear as “yes” though, and there is little evidence boiling down to the “same job” disparity.
Given the government is introducing the legislation to stop the cycle of unfair pay employment tribunals (that are often successful), I think you’re not looking at the same data set they are.
Would that actually be a good thing? When a company publishes the salary range, that means the job seeker agrees to that range, including maybe getting the lower part of the range. Companies know that, and now they have the advantage to put lower ranges.
if i don't agree to the range then i don't need to bother applying. saves me lot's of time.
if i apply despite not liking the range i can still say no and ask for more, but not knowing the range in advance is unlikely to raise the chance of that happening.
How is that going to work if you interview Bob for X task at Y pay, but discover Bob would be much better suited for A task that is worth more salary? What if Bob didn't meet the requirements for X, but would be a perfect fit for B task that is not worth as much salary?
The requirement is to publish either minimal salary or salary range for the position from the advertisement. If company has several positions available then specific minimal salaries should be given for each.
Sometimes companies create a specific position for an interviewee after getting to know the candidate. For example, a candidate might have an unexpected unusual skill.
What does that have to do with providing a salary range for a particular job posting? That specific position created should also have a range - publish that. Normally you have to interview other candidates for this position too.
Unless you’re some VP/Director/Distinguished Eng/C-level etc, this doesn’t happen in practice. Those jobs don’t follow normal job posting rules anyway, they’re usually sought out.
99.99% of the time, I doubt the job is ever adapted for the person. They come in with that skillset and are usually expected to grow and meet the needs of the other job areas.
And in any normal court they will lose since its a different position and they agreed (paper trail) for that switch. Or they could be just let go if company is too careful. Not that such situation happens often in real world, I never even heard about even one.
If they would sue it would also burn their professional creds permanently, nobody sane would ever want to hire such a problematic person.
Then you tell Bob about how he would be much better suited for job A or B, explain how the pay is less, and if he's cool with it, directly put his CV into the pile for that job. If he's not cool with it, shake his hand and wish him a good day
Presumably the law will be written to account for advertised role != assigned role, but it can't account for gaming the system by never hiring exactly the advertised position.
Labour's approach to problems is to tax employers into oblivion and then say "the reason salaries are so low is because we didn't ban them from posting adverts without salary disclosure".
To be clear, I mean employment is already taxed extremely highly.
Burnham put cost of living as his highest priority, then this is the kind of measures he comes out with. If you think more red tape and bureaucracy is going to help then I've got nothing.
This isn’t red tape or bureaucracy though. Many things are, but not this. Infact it actually reduces waste for both comapnies and citizens because they won’t have people applying who will turn down due to the salary.
Mandatory Gender Pay Gap Reporting (Conservative Party 2017)
Pay Transparency Pilot (Conservative Party 2022) - (Participating employers only) list salary ranges on all job adverts and stop asking applicants for their salary history during recruitment
For some reason cultists get all excited that one particular person is single handedly destroying everything that is great and true - by doing the same thing their lord and saviour does.
A second reason is to avoid discrimination. Applicants that feel disadvantaged, even if they are actually qualified, may hesitate to negotiate for a higher salary in the same way that a other applicants would. The consequence is that they start with a lower salary. This applies specially to women. Plenty of research shows that they are less likely to negotiate their salary.
Research[1] suggests that pay transparency leads to lower average salaries because employers avoid paying higher wages to any one employee to avoid costly negotiations with others. The effect is small, around 2%, and it disappears with increasing degree of unionization. In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w28903
I've tried the opposite, paid everyone the same. But there were clear differences in ability and more importantly outside options. It became a problem when it came to retention and the business didn't have the ability to overpay everyone to keep the top performers.
If you want juniors to fill out your team, why are you getting a bunch of seniors?
My first question to any recruiter is now always "what's the salary range for this role?" precisely because I've run into your first point earlier in my career. I'm not even particularly salary-driven (doing interesting, valuable work is far more important!) but it's the best indicator that the role is pitched at the right level for me.
From an employer's point of view, there's also the avoidance of future unpleasantness if (or, rather, when) it comes to light that some staff are paid significantly less than their peers.
Responsible employers don't need mandatory salary disclosures to do the right thing here but, sadly, not all employers are responsible so this sets a common baseline and ensures everyone plays by the same rules.
The concept of range isn't useful to ask though. If you say my range is $x to $y, all the company hears is that you'll work for $x. The $y part is irrelevant. Learned this early in my career, where every "$x to $y" invariably became an offer for $x.
So now in my initial intro call with any recruiter I just tell them my minimum, fully knowing that becomes the maximum offer. If they're ok with that we can keep talking, if not, that's cool, we both avoided wasting time.
That way you can respond to their range with something along the lines of "that sounds roughly what I was expecting", "okay, I'd probably be looking for the top end of that", "that's perhaps a little lower than I was expecting - is there enough room for flexibility for us to be able to continue talking?" or whatever. It's too early in the conversation to be doing a full salary negotiation, you're just making sure the role's at the right level.
There's a big problem with employers writing a senior-sounding job ad for a junior role - the salary range is a much more accurate indicator than a job description.
It's very hard for people to accept that this might even be the case, many people just assume that transparency is better for workers.
That said I think Jury is still out on pay transparency mostly because there isn't that much practical data. The EU has been navigating it for a few years but research is still ongoing.
One paper (which is more focused on pay gap reporting, which is longer implemented and seems to have limited impact) suggests salary disclosure in job ads actually increases wages.
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pay-transparency-in-pro...
It's definitely obvious that internal salary transparency will a) act to normalise salaries over the long term and b) generally depress salaries. But disclosure at the job as stage is less clear.
We will invent narratives to protect our ego and will happily keep other people down (including ourselves) instead of confronting this.
"He just got promoted because he's more outgoing, he's not more talented than me!"
Ok let's assume thats true. But if your job involves spending 40 hours a week with someone (more than your family), it turns out humans value being around charming, outgoing people. Is this wrong or is it the market accurately assessing relative value in the context of the actual work (collaborating with other humans)?
See also: hiking the minimum wage (possibly the most obvious example of academic corruption), rent controls, taxing the rich, etc.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary ones are 1) economists also respond to incentives and those think tank jobs pay really well and 2) prestige in the industry is also a commodity - a commodity which can be bought and sold. The level to which money talks in this industry is reflected by the wages - always higher than all other humanities.
As an example the freakonomics guys popularity are to popular economics what k pop is to music: a slick, highly refined, marketed product from a superbly well oiled marketing machine.
Not everyone has the time, energy or patience to do that though. Journalists certainly don't and the general public is more inclined to be drawn in by a nice clickbaity story that makes them feel smarter than their friends (which is the market segment freakonomics services).
Point being if you were to make an assumption, "pop economist says that popular thing thing that is bad for profits is bad for you too is probably bullshit" is actually a fairly safe one.
It's why we require public companies to disclose their finances. How could a person, even in theory, know whether to invest otherwise? It's why we require sellers of houses to deliver an independent inspection report. Etc etc.
The converse is also why HFT companies make more money than croesus.
At least the young women in UK are outearning (and outeducating) young men.
More critically; historical data shows pay gap for women increases through their 20s and jumps significantly in their 30s
A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.
I'll argue that money goes to those who are best at internal politics, with perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance.
The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales ... even then the correlation was not 1
Maybe I've been lucky to work for moderately reasonable companies, but I've never seen that.
For example in my current company, yearly raises are directly tied to performance rating. And while there is subjectivity in the rating, it is basically impossible to squeeze in a high performer rating for someone who doesn't do anything even if I wanted to (which I don't). It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
The correlation will never be a perfect 1.0, but it is closer to 1 than to 0. Low performers end up getting low to nothing in raises, and the high performers get a multiplier that increases their raises.
- Some employee salary discrepancies are inefficiencies due to humans sucking at rationally evaluating other people
- Some employee salary discrepancies are legitimate outcomes of value produced relative to other employees
The problem is the more we create policy assuming the first one is true, we eliminate everyone in the second category (however small or large that category), making the economy less efficient. I would argue pay transparency isn't one of those policies however, and in fact would lead to more efficiencies.
That said, all interventions have consequences, and less growth and higher inefficiency from cutting tall poppies is indeed a risk. As someone in Europe, our total lack of productivity growth is leading to collapsing governments, underwater social entitlement systems and mass riots. These are serious issues that should be discussed and not dismissed outright with downvotes.
Let me guess, your next rebuttal:
> "But then we'll create more policy to try to stop the downsides of the first policy we created!"
Now you have a patchwork of 48,000 regulations all collectively harming the efficiency of the economy and creating all sorts of weird un-intended consequences and loopholes for low-trust people to game instead of rewarding honest people for doing the right thing like you intended.
My actual response "But then we will have to deal with biases, discretion and management collecting their 10mil bonus by giving the juniors a pittance"
The flip side of course is people who actually work in bonus heavy revenue generating roles - where the impact is easy to measure - tend to leave if they are not valued and take their clients with them.
Things work a lot better in a healthy economy with competition and low friction for people to move around - exploitation blossoms when people are trapped by economic circumstances
What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.
Not if high performers underrate their skill, and under-performers overestimate their skill, both of which studies suggest is true.
Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.
Absolutely not. It has a maximum, sure, and a minimum it can get away with, but there's always a range in between them.
> Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees
Bold assumption that the best are paid the most.
The thing is, if you're rewarding performance through _process_ it ends up being more public and you have to have a written justification for it. Not just favouritism.
When they hire and amazing 100x employee they have higher sales, revenues and profits with which to pay employees.
It is your fault if you allow the recruiting process to get to the third interview without at least knowing if the salary range is acceptable.
If you lack confidence in talking money, here is what you say:
"I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer."
You might add:
"$120K is my minimum but I am really hoping to find a role at the higher end - $130K is what I'm aiming for, depending on the job."
If, after saying all this, you get lowballed, then you have good reason to be very annoyed, and express calmly but clearly that you have had your minimum salary on the table since the first phone call." At that point you withdraw from the process and go look for a job with a professional company.
This law will force them to actaully stick to a number.
No it won't - such a thing would never be pursued by anyone or enforced it's not worth the effort.
As I said, if you get lowballed after making it clear at the start then just withdraw and move on, find a company that is professional.
The law will make it visible how much a company values someone with those skills. Companies won’t advertise the salary though, they will advertise the range.
Also, large parts of the UK culturally have difficulty talking about money. (Exceptions are Yorkshire, which is proud of it's difference here, and (parts of?) Scotland). That's not going to change overnight, so making disclosure a legal requirement is a fair solution.
It isn't uncommon to be given an acceptable figure, go through several rounds of interviews and end up with job offer but with a lower salary than initially agreed because the recruiter padded the numbers.
No, it doesn't lose the negotiation. What makes you think so? Setting anchors and controlling the document is very powerful.
But yes, you need to know what you can get, and you need to be able and willing to walk away.
> I'm looking for $120K to $130K. Before we get further into the process I want to confirm that this salary range is what would be discussed if we get to an offer.
For me, being fresh out of university, I didn't really think to press on salary too much and was just happy to land a job. In my first job, I recall not knowing the salary until I got the contract and offer (luckily, it was surprisingly above average pay).
When I moved into the software industry, I started to realise my worth a bit more and job-hopped for 10-50% pay bumps on an annual basis for the first few years and just started chasing higher salaries and turning down interviews unless they were in my desired range.
I know many other engineers who never changed this behaviour (or were never taught to be more ruthless and know their worth) and were just happy to receive any increase in salary - and as a result had 10+ years in the industry and had utterly pitiful salaries due to their employer simply taking advantage - you'll never receive the same increase in pay by remaining loyal to a company versus job hopping. I'm not sure if it's a cultural thing in the UK or what but this is the type of advice that should be given in schools more IMO.
Let's say you could command 100k/year but your first job is 30k/year and stay there for several years because you like the work environment. Then you'd go to the next company and ask for, I dunno, maybe 50k/year and think that's a huge bump. If you saw salary ranges for similar positions elsewhere you'd be more inclined to start looking around even if you were happy at your current employer.
Nowadays things are a bit more transparent in the tech world with stuff like levels.fyi (but you have to know about those), but I'm thinking it would benefit people in all fields.
Sure, but the first phone call happens after you have already spent potentially hours putting together a tailored resume, cover letter, and 3 creative writing prompts about how you resolved a conflict with a coworker.
Would you agree to buy a house before you knew what it costs?
Literally insane behaviour
Depending on your circumstances, that might be reasonable. If most people aren't quoting pay ranges and you need a job, not applying because of that isn't very smart.
I would make sure I knew the pay range before going through all the interview rounds, but not sending your CV in sounds too limiting to me.
Recruiters at big companies will be told to advertise the role within the payband (the min to max pay for that role at that pay band)
So if you see a top end number and think you’ll get that, you probably won’t it will be around the middle of the range.
At that point you go back to the recruiter and state that you would expect the top end of the range. They may agree with you but then keep in mind that may also impact your salary increase at the end of the year, meaning a smaller increase for you compared to your peers which over several years would even out and out you back in the middle of the payband like your peers. This is why the common idea is to jump roles every few years.
That's the first I've heard of it, and I've seen plenty of job postings the past year for European companies where there was no salary indication. See for example the recent HN Who's Hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50338728
Also “in the last year” means only ~50% of that time is covered by when enforcement started.
Some countries have yet to pass any legislation too, this happens quite a lot if you look into past EU declarations, so companies there might be using that as a loophole to act as if not yet be effectively covered (in theory they could be taken to court over it, but that is can be complicated, or at least expensive, when there is no local legislation yet, so in practise it is far less likely to happen). What action will be taken by the EU to push things forward, I'm not sure, presumably there is some sort of fine for extended non-compliance? The question of who you are advertising to and where from can get a bit complex if you are a company in a member state that has not yet enacted anything, especially when you operate out of more than one territory.
Most of the jobs in that HN thread do give a salary expectation (though a few with a very wide range, which might be outside the rules, but they were US anyway so not covered), I don't think I saw an EU one in my quick scan that did not (at least one UK one, but again those are not currently covered by such rules).
Again, member states miss European deadlines, but since it has no practical consequences, I don't see a why they would do it differently.
I wouldn't have been bothered if it where some exhaustive reform of the work law, but in practice it would amount to a couple of amendments. Probably could be drafted up in an afternoon.
So companies are not even breaking the law, just delaying the process...
I was like, okay, fair enough.
I played it completely wrong though. I should have just reframed it and said, well, I paid this, but you're not competing against my current employer, you're competing against Meta, who I'm also interviewing with this week.
In small companies this does mean people have to operate with internal Chinese walls in their heads.
"My current salary is xyz, but I'm currently interviewing with several companies, so my salary expectations are tied to what I'm worth in the market, not my current pay. My specific ask will change as interviews progress"
They also don't know if your tax band is due to salary, loans, deduction, pensions, second incomes etc.
That entire sentence could be stricken out and nothing would change.
When I’ve raised this to a CEO that was bragging that he gives competitive salaries but can’t disclose it, he said that a person that asks for the range before the interview it’s in it for the money.
As an employer that ruins one of the classic ruses that has been going on for a while: take someone through multiple interviews and then lowball the candidate who seems the most desperate.
If you believe in free market economics I think we can expect this to be a mess for a little while and then within a year or two it gets relatively efficient at dealing with the inefficiencies it’s targeting: younger people just not wanting to play the bullshit game where employers dangle generous starting offers, and then rug pull them to 2/3rds of that number; and to fix the gender pay gap (and the smaller reaching ethnicity pay gap).
There is no gender pay gap in 20s, 30s with several areas now favouring women. The mean pay gap is entirely due to the percentage of women in their 40s+ taking time off work for motherhood.
A woman who has two children, at minimum, works two years less. In a (25 - 65) yr career that's a 10% pay gap she'll experience wrt a male who works the same period.
The paygap is just a dial which controls the rate of motherhood.
There is no "per job" paygap. Nor could there plausibly be. For if any group could be paid less to do the same work, someone en mass would be, thus lowering the pay for that work. (Its unclear how such a rich source of free output from 50% of the population could go untapped, systematically).
Though even if that logic isnt persuasive, there is no measured per-job pay difference at an individual level. The "pay gap" describes a mean difference in pay at population level -- when you control for total hours worked, it disappears.
Do they? I've seen women take 6 months or even 3 months maternity leave, with their partner stepping in to support.
I've never met a mother who wanted to be in work full time. What exactly do zoom meetings, email threads, and spreadsheets get you in life?
I'm not one to say "captialism has gone too far", but perhaps in this case at least, isnt it mad to force average labour hours to be the same across sexes "just because" ?
the goal is to require men to take equal parental leave in order to remove that pressure and put women and men on a more equal position when it comes to children.
today women are considered a hiring risk because they might have children and take parental leave. if fathers were required to take parental leave as well, then the risk would be more similar for both.
We can also do the simulation trivially using empirical data, women on average in the UK have 2 children, and take four years out of work to have them, and when in work, work for 9 years part-time. That creates a theoretical paygap of 20% on a 40 year career across male/female populations
The claim that the economy sustains a free markdown on 50% of the population's labour is mad. What force of nature is keeping a mass of businesses forming just hiring this cheap labour? Why arent there businesses booming hiring, en mass, women?
Either way, aside from that madness. The effect is, to a significant figure, entirely explained by working duration not differential pay.
And I've personally known no mothers who think the population of women is better served by reducing their part-time work, and having them work more.
And people wonder why professional women don't want to have children any more.
The "cost" of two children, with above numbers, for "mean woman" is 20% of pay -- so she earns ~1.1m
Presented on a deathbed: would you have preferred to earn 1.4mil over your working life and have neither of your two children, or 1.1m and have both?
The question would seem an absurdity. Bearing in mind that 300k comes with a lifetime of zoom calls and emails, and not much else.
Now if you want to pay women to have children, that's a proposal I'd be open to -- it would reduce the pay gap by significant tax rises, and so on. Nevertheless, I've not met any mothers who wanted to work more nor would take the trade for 1.4 over 1.1 (this, of course, doesnt control for tax credits or welfare -- which both perform this redistribution anyway).
However that consultation said this:
>We propose to introduce this requirement [pay transparency in recruitment] through a delegated power, enabling regulations to specify exact requirements. For example, the size of a salary range.
Example: https://www.enduranceenergy.com/careers/2af3b48c-4e20-420a-b...
https://westkite.com/careers-software-engineer
Would you like to have to pin your salary on your CV? Probably you are hopeful you can get as much as possible. And employers look for a deal. It works both ways.
I agree that personally I'd prefer to see the salary on the job advert. But state meddling generally leads to unexpected outcomes.
I've spent my entire career on the other side of hiring and I've yet to encounter a single valid excuse for not knowing, and subsequently not advertising, a salary range. Before you hire, you need to know if you can afford to hire. If you know you can afford to hire, you know what you can afford to pay. It really is that simple.
For example, when I buy a used car or a house, I know what my budget is. But I'm not telling the seller that upfront. Because my budget does not mean I want to pay the top end of the budget. I'd rather pay below my budget if I can.
The only excuse for forcing employers to do declare is that you want to hold them to a higher ethical standard. Not because there's no reason to do otherwise strategically.
Yeah I get the whole "if we advertise a range, everyone will demand the top of the range" argument. Unfortunately, that assumption has never held true.
The "complications" are basically employer and manager propaganda because the information asymmetry suits them better than people realising they are undervalued and leaving
For the low-paid, it can make it even harder to get credit, or a place to rent, and it can be used for other kinds of discrimination. For the highly-paid, service providers and sales people can use the information to increase the prices you pay and make negotiation harder.
Parasitical private equity firms maximising their prices is a reasonable worry.
Obviously it's not perfect. But as you say, it's a difficult problem. And salary ranges are at least something
Even if the minimum does apply everywhere, it fixes the inequalities gap that is causing so much economic drag in the UK: white men earn significantly more than any other demographic today for the exact same roles at the exact same companies. If everyone gets the bottom of the band, at least everyone gets the same, and that’s been an important goal for multiple UK governments of different political stripes over many decades for reasons to complex to go into here (and no, it’s not “political correctness”, it’s far more complex than that).
I also don’t think it likely means average salaries come down, I just think it means the distributions narrow.
I think this would be illegal under the Equality Act (which does not of course mean it doesn't happen), can you offer some examples or further reading?
Until then, you are quite correct. The pay gap is not a feature of individual jobs, but a population effect due to women in their 40s+ not being in the labour force.
It is illegal in the UK to pay differently, and there are many high profile cases of this being enforced even to the point of absurdity (such as forcing councils to pay bin-men/trash-collectors the same as female office admin workers).
Likewise as the mean pay for women is ~1month/yr lower, the mean hours men work, as a population is ~1month/yr longer. Thus there is no pay gap once you control for hours worked.
Incidentally, the only way there could be no mean pay gap across both populations would be if no women had children. So a non-trivial paygap merely an indirect measure of the birth rate.
Is there any evidence that’s the case?
Employment tribunals in the UK now regularly conclude that jobs which are clearly different are actually the same, essentially as a bung to women. For example, stating that working in a warehouse lifting boxes all day is the same job as working on a checkout till sitting on a seat, or that being a librarian has the same value as a guy collecting garbage. Being a bin man is much higher paid because it's a dangerous, dirty and low status job that people don't want to do, so the incentives have to be correspondingly higher to attract workers, but delusional left wing tribunals declare by fiat that they're the same as highly feminized jobs that are clean and safe.
This is causing chaos in Britain, for example in Birmingham where trash just doesn't get collected because the bin men went on strike:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%932026_Birmingham_b...
> The council also says that the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer role does not exist at other councils, and that retaining the role opens it up to equal pay claims, since it is performed mainly by men.[2] In March 2025, the council declared a major incident after 17,000 tonnes of rubbish were left uncollected on the streets.
Look at the wider picture of unfair pay employment tribunals that are driving HMG to introduce this legislation and you’ll see the problem is real, systemic and decades old.
I have personally had to advise boards that their discussion of compensation adjustments to women of child bearing age are illegal, it is a rife and widespread practice and absurd.
One is that women do get paid less for the same job on average.
The second is that jobs which women tend to do get paid less than jobs which men tend to do, either through different industries or through different opportunities.
It’s not as clear as “yes” though, and there is little evidence boiling down to the “same job” disparity.
Quick reminder of the classic takedown of that misleading nonsense:
Cathy Newman interviewing Jordan Peterson on the gender pay gap etc
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xg2psply4no
Original:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54
You didn't need to bring colour and gender into it.
if i apply despite not liking the range i can still say no and ask for more, but not knowing the range in advance is unlikely to raise the chance of that happening.
99.99% of the time, I doubt the job is ever adapted for the person. They come in with that skillset and are usually expected to grow and meet the needs of the other job areas.
If they would sue it would also burn their professional creds permanently, nobody sane would ever want to hire such a problematic person.
Sounds like lose-lose.
So what is the point of the law, if there are all these workarounds?
Burnham put cost of living as his highest priority, then this is the kind of measures he comes out with. If you think more red tape and bureaucracy is going to help then I've got nothing.
The opposite to bureaucracy is allowing them to approach hiring however they see fit.
Mandatory Gender Pay Gap Reporting (Conservative Party 2017)
Pay Transparency Pilot (Conservative Party 2022) - (Participating employers only) list salary ranges on all job adverts and stop asking applicants for their salary history during recruitment
This political timeline is the worst.