A huge number of employers are still reluctant to include salary data on job advertisements, even as workers around the globe are demanding more transparency—and even in markets in which posting pay is mandated by law—new research shows.
People Managing People, a human resources company, recently analyzed over 8,000 job advertisements posted on LinkedIn for positions based in the U.S. and U.K.
It found that over a third—or 36%—of the ads for jobs based in the U.S. included no salary details. Of the 4,000 jobs analyzed that were based in the U.K., some 53% didn’t include salary information.
Even in U.S. states in which salary transparency legislation has come into effect or is slated to do so soon, many employers are neglecting to publish pay information, according to the findings. In the state of New York, for example, where almost all employers must disclose a salary range in job postings, 10% of advertisements omit pay information, the research found.
Several factors are driving this reluctance to publish pay, said Finn Bartram, an HR expert at People Managing People. One is enforcement. In theory, state and local governments are responsible for penalizing non-compliance, but scant information is available on whether authorities are, indeed, cracking down—and if they are, what repercussions employers are actually facing. In some cases, Bartram noted, there’s also “a lack of public awareness that these enforcements are even in place.”
And finally, he added, “the legislation may simply not be powerful enough.” In other words, companies might not be scared enough of breaking the law.
“[Companies are] finding loopholes that make it very easy to bypass these regulations,” Bartram said. One example, he added, is that the New York pay transparency law “is based on ‘good faith’ and requires companies to determine ranges based on their best estimates.”
An Expectation of Transparency
The lack of transparency, as evidenced by the latest research, is concerning for several reasons.
Firstly, pay secrecy is known to perpetuate systemic and entrenched pay inequity—particularly along gender and racial lines.
Women who work full-time in the U.S. still only earn approximately 82% of what men do, and that figure has barely moved in recent decades. The gender pay gap is even more pronounced for black and Hispanic women, and pay gaps persist for workers with a disability or who identify as LGBTQ+, too.
Research has shown that transparency can create accountability and counteract both conscious and unconscious bias. It can also help level the demand playing field: some research has shown that women and minority workers, for example, tend to ask for less money than their white, male counterparts.
Another reason is that a growing number of employees have come to expect a prospective employer to be open about what they’re willing to pay. Transparency has become an expected institutional value.
Earlier this year, a survey of thousands of human resource professionals conducted by Payscale, a software provider, found that almost a third—or 27%—of organizations said that employees are asking more questions about their pay than they had done in the past. More than one in ten respondents to that survey said that they had seen employees quit their job because they saw advertised positions with higher pay elsewhere. Approximately the same proportion of respondents said that employees had seen an internal job posting for a similar role and had realize they were being paid less.