Are Pay Transparency Laws Working?
Episode 444 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Zoë Cullen
Research-backed insights into the effects of pay transparency laws.
Pay transparency is a Bossed Up policy priority, and my guest on today’s episode has embarked on an in-depth, data-driven exploration of the results of this movement across the globe. Zoë Cullen is a scholar investigating gender gaps within the workforce. She is currently an assistant professor of entrepreneurial management at Harvard Business School, as well as a National Bureau of Economic Research affiliate in Labor Studies and associate editor of the Journal of Political Economy.
The TaskRabbit test subject
The numbers highlighting the impact of pay transparency first became apparent to Zoë in a project she undertook using data from the online freelance marketplace, TaskRabbit. When she compared pay rates between contractors hired separately for the same types of jobs versus groups of contractors hired together to complete a single job (such as a team hired to pack boxes for a large company), Zoë saw significant differences.
Whereas the pay range for individual hires ranged widely, when hired as a group, the rates paid to each individual evened out. It was clear that discussion between the people in the group was resulting in far more wage parity across the board. Zoë broadened her research, contrasting the results of wage changes in states and countries with pay transparency laws in place and those without.
Horizontal vs. vertical pay transparency
During her research, the difference between two types of pay transparency—horizontal and vertical—offered up some surprising findings.
Horizontal pay transparency refers to gaining clarity about what your coworkers are making; in other words, the income of those who do jobs of a similar type and at a similar level in the same or similar hierarchy of the workplace. Vertical pay transparency is about gaining the knowledge of what those above you in the hierarchy make—your immediate supervisor all the way up to the C-suite.
When horizontal pay structures are disclosed, the reaction is what we have come to expect: learning that you’re paid less than your colleagues who are performing similar work is agitating, and can create poor morale. It’s no surprise to hear that employees experience lower job satisfaction upon learning that some of their coworkers make more than they do.
We might expect, then, that upon learning what our bosses rake in, we feel doubly disgruntled, especially since these dollar amounts are often even higher than we expect. But Zoë’s research shows the opposite is true. Rather than adopting an “eat the rich” mentality, the revelation of these incomes—even for roles far beyond what most employees expect to reach—evokes measurable increases in motivation, driven by evidence that suggests working hard and pursuing promotions could be an extremely lucrative endeavor.
Given these results, it might seem strange that higher-level executives are still often resistant to disclose their pay. However, there are many reasons people might want to keep their pay private at different levels—long-standing societal taboos around talking about money, for instance—and over time, this mutes both the potentially detrimental and the beneficial effects.
Average worker pay in the face of transparency
Negotiation is another reason that comes to my mind when I consider why individual workers might not wholeheartedly embrace the idea of pay transparency. For the employee who has skillfully negotiated their way to impressive raises over the years, disclosure of their income and the resulting parity removes the impact of this accomplishment.
To be clear, finding out that someone in a similar position to yours makes more than you can help your negotiation power. However, the data from states with pay transparency laws show that this level of information sharing, often comes with more rigid pay policies and lower average wage growth, overall. If a company now faces upward pressure on wages from every employee in a position, rather than just a few assertive negotiators, they often respond by creating more clear, but rigid pay policies and pay bands.
This might sound like a negative on the surface, but Zoë says there is no question that pay transparency laws are having their intended effect: they are contributing to pay equity. Gender parity certainly improves, and while there is not enough empirical evidence yet to show similarly shrinking racial gaps, Zoë allows that the effect is likely similar.
Zoë is confident there is a future where farther-reaching pay transparency laws deliver an unequivocal net positive. Already, some data suggests that both employees and hiring managers are benefiting: salary transparency early on in the hiring process helps ensure that everyone’s on the same page from the start, reducing wasted time and money.
I would love for you to weigh in on the pay transparency conversation. If you live in a region with pay transparency laws on the books, how are they affecting your career strategy? If your area doesn’t have these laws, how do you find out the information you need to go into your job search equipped with solid salary data? Share your thoughts in the Courage Community on Facebook or join us in our group on LinkedIn.
Related Links from today’s episode:
Read Zoë’s article, “Is Pay Transparency Good?”
Read Zoë’s article, “Equilibrium Effects Of Pay Transparency”
Episode 146 “Step-By-Step Negotiation Prep”
TAKE ACTION: ADVOCATE FOR PAY TRANSPARENCY:
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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 444. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up.
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And today I'm excited to share a conversation I just had with Zoë B. Cullen, a scholar who's been studying pay transparency and its impacts on worker wages. As we dig into the question, are pay transparency laws working? As you may or may not know, before I started Bossed Up in 2013, which historically, we've really focused on individual advocacy, how we can, as women, advocate for ourselves in the workplace. But prior to starting Bossed Up, I was an advocate on the political stage. I worked as a state director with the Obama campaign after the election to focus on passing policy initiatives like the Affordable Care Act. And that advocacy part of me, that systemic thinker in me, has never gone away, truly. So, last year, as I really sought to kind of broaden our horizons at Bossed Up and expand our lens beyond individual self advocacy in the workplace, we created an action hub at bossedup.org/takeaction, where we came up with five specific policy initiatives that we are throwing our support behind, and one of them is advocating for pay transparency laws. There you can find more details on the status of those laws, how you can throw your support behind them, and why we think it's so important for bringing that sort of systemic approach to the policies that actually lead to gender equity, not just the individual actions that we can take to kind of, you know, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps.
Today's conversation is a wonderful extension of that desire to think more systematically. I'm speaking with Zoë Cullen, who earned her PhD from Stanford Economics in 2016. Between 2016 and 2018, she worked for a southeast Asian bank in the Chief Economist role, and then in 2018, she joined Harvard Business School as an assistant professor in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. Her research is focused on labor markets and online market design. She's an NBER affiliate in labor studies and associate editor at the Journal of Political Economy. And so much of her research has focused on gender gaps, primarily in pay, but also in the workplace overall. Her most recent paper is called Equilibrium Effects Of Pay Transparency, and I'm so excited to dig into her research findings with Zoë here today. Zoë welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
ZOË: Thank you for having me. This is a true pleasure.
EMILIE: I'm excited to dive into all things pay transparency with you. You're a bit of a pay transparency geek. Uh, I don't know if you align with that title, but I love talking to academics whenever I can, here on the pod, because you study this stuff. Is that right?
ZOË: That's true. It was the kind of rabbit hole that you never expect, like, ten years in. I'm still researching that topic.
EMILIE: So tell me how that came to be. How did you find yourself making this your work?
ZOË: The first paper did not project the 10th paper, so it was really step by step. And the very first project was in a collaboration with TaskRabbit. So TaskRabbit, if, for those who don't know, is just a peer to peer platform that facilitates household tasks. And I was looking at their data, and I just noticed that when people hired many TaskRabbits, they're not called TaskRabbits anymore, but many people to work on the job at once, together, they would show up. And in the data you could see on those occasions, they would get the same pay. And in other cases, because at the time, each worker was just accepting bids for the job. So when they didn't show up to the job at the same time in the same place, they would get very different pay. You know, even a simple task like packing boxes or getting ready for the Q4 for a business. Eventually, workers would ask for all sorts of things from ranging from, like $15 an hour to $35 an hour. And you could really see a like, lot of inequality, just not the case if it was Nordstrom's hiring everyone at once. So, of course, it's not obvious that pay transparency is related to this, but, you know, bit by bit, it became clear that they were talking to each other and asking their employer for tips to sort of make up for differences.
EMILIE: You know, that definitely is a microcosm of what happens on a broader scale. Right. So we've seen pay transparency legislation really gaining a lot of traction in recent years. For context, here at Bossed Up, I'm always trying to find the right balance between advocating for individuals to ask for more and negotiate for all their worth, with the alternative of making sure we're also advocating for the systemic solutions that at least hypothetically lead to more gender equity.
ZOË: Exactly. It's one of these rare cases where what I would recommend to an individual is quite different from what I would recommend as a systemic solution to the problem.
EMILIE: Oh, I'm intrigued. We'll have to dig into that more first, set the stage. What do you see as sort of the status of pay transparency laws globally? Because you've studied this.
ZOË: You know, I do study it internationally precisely because it just seemed to really take off. It's like a wildfire across Europe, many different countries have been experimenting with quite different policies. And then you've seen the South Pacific islands also trying things. So, yes, it's been driven by policy choices.
EMILIE: That's interesting. And I think I read in your paper somewhere that, like, upwards to 22 states in America have some form of pay transparency legislation on the books, which I was surprised by. I thought it was like only seven statewide pay transparency laws have been passed. But maybe there's lots of other municipalities who have measures on the docket as well. Is that right?
ZOË: The honest reality is that, in fact, every single state is subject to pay transparency laws. However, most of them, or the key blanket federal legislation, doesn't have the kind of teeth necessary for people to become familiar with it and live by it. So what you said is absolutely right. Those are the kind of the states and cities that have actually taken steps, mostly in the last two decades, to really make those policies more, just have more clause and penalize employers for violating them.
EMILIE: Right? I'm here in Denver, Colorado, so I'm proud to be in the state that passed the 2019 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act. And in my spare time, just for funsies, I report violators of that law. And I watch in delight as the Department of Labor truly does go after them and sometimes issues pretty hefty $10,000 fines per violation. And I…
ZOË: Oh that’s cool.
EMILIE: …yeah, and I take great pleasure in that. In fact, anyone who's listening can go to my website in our Take Action page, which has all kinds of systemic solutions that we're advocating for at Bossed Up, and you can find how to report violators in Colorado and New York. So if anyone wants to join me in being a vigilante, pay equity justice warrior, uh, I would welcome the company.
ZOË: How do you find out that the fine has truly been imposed?
EMILIE: You can't find out the fine has been imposed, but what they have been doing is there's been some good press that at least, like, one year after the law took effect, there was some good press with total numbers included of the total amount collected from violators. And I'm just going to take some credit for at least a couple of thousand of those, you know. But you can see the change, because some companies are just taking the fine and taking the hit. And most companies, you'll see them rectify the situation. Like, you will see the job reposted with pay bands. So it's exciting when we talk about pay transparency, we're really covering a wide swath of laws, though, right? So, one of the terms that I came across in your research, I would love for you to elaborate upon is information frictions, and in the context of sort of like, a lot of these pay transparency laws are designed to address that. But what is information friction? Why don't we start there?
ZOË: Okay. That makes me think I should rewrite some of these papers. It's one of my favorite words to use. You see it even in titles. So the technical way I'm using it is when people have uncertainty or not fully informed, and the friction is usually the reason why it's plural. And the reason why I don't spell it out clearly is because it's an umbrella term for all sorts of things that get in the way of people finding out the truth. So if you think about salaries, the first thing usually comes to mind for people is just how sensitive it is. They don't necessarily want to talk about it, so the taboos can get in the way. But, of course, there are cases also where the law gets in the way. Like, companies are not explicitly allowed to share salary information with their competing companies. So, there are many reasons for the friction.
EMILIE: Yeah. And just for solving for some information friction here, I think I should call out that there's a little one on your side of the mic who might be making a little bit of wonderful background noise because you have a, how old infant in your arms right now?
ZOË: About a month now.
EMILIE: Four week old. Oh, my god. A little month old baby. First of all, big congrats. And talk about multitasking like you're wearing your super mom hat and your super scholar hat right now, so I just want to say thank you to both you and baby for being here. One of the things about those taboos, we actually talked about this on another episode recently with Erin Lowry, better known as The Broke Millennial. Back on episode 319, How To Talk With Your Friends And Family About Money is just a reminder of norms versus rights. We have the right in America because a lot of my listeners are tuning in from the US. We have the right to talk about money with our colleagues. We have the right to talk about salary with our colleagues. But a lot of companies policies try to make that feel like a scary thing to do. Is that right?
ZOË: That is right, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the number of gag laws have declined, in part because of just how. Well, I would say, actually, a big push was in 2016, when Obama actually argued that federal contractors should have some of these more strong laws penalizing employers for instituting the gag law. Anyways, that I think our way towards reducing the number of companies, at least the ones that have explicit clauses in their contracts saying, we cannot disclose this, by the way, you're still supposed to disclose it with your fellow coworkers because it's in part way of getting together and potentially collectively negotiating.
EMILIE: Right. So you're saying. I mean, this is some interesting differences here. First of all, contractors don't have the same rights as employees, right? So if you're a 1099, they can throw a gag clause in your contract and restrict your ability. But again, Obama has made that less of an acceptance practice. And then even if you are a W2 employee and you have workplace rights to collectively discuss your pay and your workplace conditions with your colleagues presumptively to enable collective bargaining, you can't share that information with others outside the workplace. Right?
ZOË: Right, yeah. So everything you said might very well be true. I was actually referring those to the federal contractors. So whenever a company bids for one of the government jobs that are available or posted, they become officially a federal contractor. They have more stringent rules and regulations around employment and make up about 25% of the workforce. So when individual states enact pay transparency laws, that's fabulous. But when it applies to all federal contract workers, it almost becomes very close to federal law.
EMILIE: Wow. Why isn't it federal law yet? Have you looked into that? I've been, uh, trying to get more info from our DC representative who introduced federal legislation that's just died in committee, like a few times now. But one can only hope.
ZOË: A lot of things are happening in the world, so it’s about priority.
EMILIE: I suppose. You have a point, you have a point. So, one of the other terms I came across in your research is clarifying vertical versus horizontal wage transparency. And I thought it was really interesting how those two differences have different outcomes. Can you explain that?
ZOË: Yeah, they have very different outcomes. And the horizontal pay transparency is more or less what we have been discussing because it's very natural when people think about pay transparency policies to think about whether or not you know what your coworker makes. So these are all the policies that are geared towards targeting discrimination explicitly. And so they're really trying to expose employers for having a gap between two people who are otherwise doing similar work. And all of the legislation actually uses similar work, similar work, similar work. So it's not about whether you know what your boss makes or your boss's boss, or even what people are getting paid at a different firm. It's really directed at your colleague.
EMILIE: Mhm. And that's the horizontal wage transparency.
ZOË: Exactly.
EMILIE: What is the vertical wage transparency look like?
ZOË: So this is, you know, typically when you actually implement a pay transparency law, people learn more than just what their immediate coworker makes, if it's at the firm level, you often learn about pay bands in the positions above you. And when my colleague and I just showed individuals about their manager's earnings and their manager's, manager's earnings, the effects of that type of transparency were actually quite different from what would happen if somebody learned about a coworker's pay. So in the case of a coworker, when you find out that they are making more than you thought they made relative to you, that leads to a lot of morale effects and not particularly good ones. So most people look at people who are more highly paid than them, and it makes them kind of ticked off. Or I guess disgruntled is the more polite word. And that leads to, well, two things. One is we've seen lower measures of satisfaction, both about pay and on the job. And also people are leaving the company at higher rates.
EMILIE: Presumably they're also equipped to ask for more, though, right?
ZOË: That's exactly right. But, this gets into what I'll describe later on, what are the overall pay effects? So at the moment, I'm just really talking about what happens. Individual finds out, and I think it is really important. We'll get there, I think, in a moment. What happens, in aggregate, when employers respond, make pay raises or to do something differently. But before the employer has a chance to respond, you see these, um, strong emotional reactions. You see people quitting. And in the context of learning about your boss, we find out that like, when you find out the boss is earning significantly more than what you expected, it's a very motivating thing for most people. Why is it motivating? We think it's motivating because they're trying to actually achieve more and to earn more. So finding out your boss earns more means probably you have, uh, greater prospects at that company for higher earnings yourself.
EMILIE: I'm quoting your research directly here. You wrote, “empirical evidence suggests these policies can lead to more accurate and more optimistic beliefs about earnings potential, increasing employee motivation and productivity”, which I don't know about you, but I found surprising. Like vertical pay transparency increases motivation, not eat the rich kind of vibes from the working class. Right?
ZOË: Exactly. So we were expecting both to show up, and it is quite surprising. So the way we measured that. So you're quoting something that's about a study where individuals were at a commercial bank. We were tracking their work emails, the hours they spent in the office. We were also tracking how many credit cards they sold, how many loans they made. And so all of those measures saw a pretty substantial boost when they learned about the salaries of their higher ups. And that was because people underestimate what higher ups earn. So facts together led them to believe it was more lucrative to work harder.
EMILIE: I wonder if that effect diminishes over time. How long did you monitor that?
ZOË: Yeah, so for us, we went out six months. And, you know, that's something.
EMILIE: That's not nothing, yeah.
ZOË: We did see that. When they learn about someone in a position that's as high up as the C suite. So these are positions you're not likely to reach yourself, the motivation effects diminish substantially, but the key that you pointed out is they don't become negative. So people didn't get angry and start storming the doors, even though, of course, C suites earned a substantial amount higher than expected.
EMILIE: Yeah, and so that's so interesting. And I found it interesting. I don't remember where I read this, but you were basically saying, given this boost in motivation and the empirical evidence that this is for all intents and purposes, good for companies to be transparent with vertical pay clarity, it's a wonder that they're so resistant to doing so, because that's very rare. Is that right?
ZOË: Yes, and there's a lot to say about that. I think firms are really surprised by this because they design their financial incentives exactly to motivate people, and then they find it surprising that it's just not well understood. And I think, I don't know for sure all the reasons for the frictions here, but my strong sense is that all along the food chain, people have reasons to keep their own pay private. And so managers are thinking maybe they don't want co managers to know about this. And sooner or later it becomes the case that it's obscured from exactly the individuals that you want to understand.
EMILIE: Right, you want to motivate through that transparency. And I feel like you're right that it's such a fast moving trend in the business world and that cultural taboos around not talking about pay are so entrenched in so many cultures across the globe. Maybe this is the next frontier. You know, maybe we'll see ten years from now, things really changing, thanks to your research, in no small part. Well, speaking of your research, I was most alarmed by this finding around pay transparency, reducing average worker pay. Help me understand, what did you find when it came to its impact on average pay?
ZOË: Yeah, this gets back to this earlier point which I made, which is if you were to ask me, like, should you go find out everybody's pay as an individual, I would have said absolutely. Before you talk to your boss, you definitely want to find out because it's going to help you in the negotiation. Now, that's like my recommendation for an individual, but if everybody's doing that and employers know that that's happening? You know, if they know the pay is going to be more public, then they're absolutely going to think twice before they give someone higher pay. And the reason is, you know, if they give someone higher pay, it's become a lot more expensive. Not only does that person get a raise, but they have to deal with all these other people asking for it. And we've seen that show up in the data, so that when employers face these horizontal pay transparency laws that are within the company, between coworkers, they see a strong link between the different negotiations, and so they start to set more rigid pay policies. And that pay is lower on average. And so we've seen sort of average wages decline in reaction to some of the statewide laws that are put in place to protect workers rights to talk to each other.
EMILIE: So on the whole, do you feel like those kinds of pay transparency laws are good? Are they having its intended effect around the racial and gender wage gaps closing? Or is it an overall negative if average worker pay is going down?
ZOË: Okay, I think the good and the bad are questions that are, in fact, they're questions about preferences rather than objective questions. So I can tell you, absolutely they're achieving more equity, right? It's true that when people are bringing their pay requests to bosses and bosses understand that it's very visible. Not only is pay more rigid, it's more public. We're seeing a lot of evidence that gender pay gaps close. There's actually, I don't think there's quite enough clear documentation of race to say quite the same thing, but we would expect that to also be systematically reduced. So gaps along ethnic lines and racial lines. The reason being is that pay is just more compressed. It's actually more equal across the board. So even between two men or two women, it becomes more equal. Now, that is definitely the objective of most of these policies. And I can imagine, as the social planner here, choosing that it does come at the cost of raising wage levels.
EMILIE: I wonder, I mean, we know wages stagnated after The Great Recession. A lot of millennials tuning in here are intimately familiar with that first decade of our careers, and that like, pay, during that really employer marketplace for quite a while there, as we crawled out of The Great Recession, that pay stagnated for average workers regardless. That's changed in recent years. Right? Covid really put a lot of power into workers hands. So are you seeing wage stagnation overall, or you're seeing this directly correlated with pay transparency as leading to average worker pay going down?
ZOË: Well, so our studies are, uh, we attempt to have a causal estimate. So we're looking at this is when we're comparing states that adopt a pay transparency law over time with states that don't end up adopting that law. And because these laws have been so staggered over the last two decades, you know, we have basically a lot of controls for other things that happen over time. So in some sense, well, in a very pointed sense, I would answer your question. I think the estimates point specifically to pay transparency laws as slowing wage growth relative to states that don't adopt those policies in the US. Now, pay overall could be doing quite well.
EMILIE: Right. Slowing wage growth is really a key phrase for me, and I'm no academic, so I appreciate you helping me parse this into layman's terms here, but slowing wage growth doesn't necessarily mean, like, a net negative or net loss.
ZOË: Totally. When I see a loss, it's always in relative terms to the states that don't adopt those policies.
EMILIE: Cool. And so what I'm hearing there, and again, let me rephrase and tell me if I'm understanding this correctly, is if you're a super negotiator. Like, I myself love negotiation, and you were already doing okay in the wild, wild west, pre pay transparency loss, right? You didn't know what? Maybe you were really good at getting the insight from colleagues yourself, and you were good at making your case, and you drove a hard bargain and you kept getting pay raises. Or maybe you were just a white man and you just happened to be getting paid more on average due to systemic unconscious bias. Like, for all intents and purposes, you might be doing just fine personally while mass inequality persisted. But with wage transparency comes less personal agency like, I can't personally negotiate my way to a $10,000 you know, starting salary higher than what is stringently in the transparent pay band. Is that what you're saying?
ZOË: Yes, yes ,yes. I hear where you're going. Well I'm making some conjectures where you're going, and I want to point out that I think we can have our cake and eat it, too. I do think there are pay transparency policies that get us both greater equity and also put more upward pressure on wages.
EMILIE: Okay, tell me more. I love a high note. That sounds like a high note. I like that. Okay, I want my cake and to eat it, too.
ZOË: This is why categorizing the pay transparency laws has been so helpful for me. So understanding that certain policies, horizontal policies, create these spillovers between coworkers in the workplace when they're negotiating with one employer, other pay transparency policies. And this will take us back to the Colorado case. Other pay transparency policies are introducing cross firm transparency, where individuals are learning not about exactly what their coworkers making, but they're seeing that there are opportunities outside their firm that could be really lucrative, maybe even sometimes outside of their, uh. So in places where this has been studied, where there's a long enough trajectory. So a classic study here is now from Slovakia, they implemented these pay posts. So they mandated pay being in these job advertisements, and they saw that employees were sending out applications to more firms, firms in different occupations. And it's this kind of competition that allows people who realize they're underpaid to go seek out better paying employers. That is a big step towards higher pay and also bringing up the bottom towards the top.
EMILIE: I love that. Yeah, because information is really power when it's marketplace wide. That's what I'm hearing, right?
ZOË: It wasn't so obvious to me that was the case. But it's even true that when employers learn about the pay of their competing employers, they don't necessarily use it to collude and suppress pay. In fact, more often what it does is force employers to reconsider what is the going rate. And we've seen that raises wages, especially for lower skilled jobs.
EMILIE: Huh, you know, I'm thinking we have this, um, Salary Insights Guide at Bossed Up. It's like a free, downloadable guide with tons of industry specific reports where you can find some pay transparency information if you don't have laws mandating it in your neck of the woods. And in doing our research to produce this report, which we first published in 2020, and we're currently updating by the time this is posted, we've just released an update. I'll say for 2023, we came across so many studies and or data sets that HR professionals are paying thousands of dollars to have access to so they can price their jobs correctly. And now, first of all, that industry is hurting with pay transparency laws. But now even well intentioned HR leaders who are saying, here's what the going rate is, have a lot more information to work with as well. So in some ways, it's like, it’s not just benefiting the individuals. It's also just making sure that your whole HR team isn't fully out of whack when it comes to what the going rate should be for your candidates, right?
ZOË: Totally. I mean, I would say they're hurting a little because it's some upward pressure on wages, but it's also true that they're benefiting from the ability to hire more quickly, it looks like, and also from higher retention, lower churn. It's like when you pay market wages and you don't have to worry that when your employees start searching, they're going to find offers, then they stay longer with you. So that seems like a win win.
EMILIE: That is a win win. And, you know, a little upward pressure on wages, on employers is not a bad thing. But I see your point. So you're more likely to get people who are in the pipeline for your jobs who are fully prepared to accept the salary range that's posted. You're more likely to have them retained for a longer time. I also bet that HR teams have a faster time to hire rate because they're not wasting time interviewing four rounds in with someone who's totally got a different set of expectations than they do, right?
ZOË: What we can see in data explicitly is there's a bump up in the hiring rate. So time to fill is likely one of the metrics. I wish we could see it directly, but that's probably the case.
EMILIE: That's amazing. So what do you see as sort of the next frontier when it comes to wage transparency, either in the marketplace trends what you're currently studying? If you want to pull the curtain back a bit, or tell us a bit more about what's got your curiosity piqued.
ZOË: I would love to just see the government take a role in this, because the government collects excellent data on earnings for unemployment benefits. Each firm is submitting their payroll quarterly, and governments have that data. And what they could do is if they really cared about people being able to sort of chart their careers, you know, according to the truth out there, you should wake up in the morning and receive an envelope saying, here like, this is what the distribution of pay looks like in firms that are operating in your occupation, your industry. And here's some firms we think are at the high end. Here's some firms are at the lower end. Now you take, you know, you the next steps as you will. You can always choose to do different training, you can always choose to apply different places. And I think bit by bit, that would let, basically solve what I refer to as these information frictions that start pretty early on. Even when people are choosing their college major. You know like, to what extent do they know the implications for their career?
EMILIE: Wow. I mean, I sit in on a lot of workforce development conversations which bring the private and public sectors together and that is exactly what they need to hear. So I'm glad you're out there, you know, spreading the good message around this, and I'm excited by the vision you just shared, because that would be a much better world, I think, a more transparent world to live in. Is there any additions that you want to make sure we cover before we part ways?
ZOË: Oh, gosh. I mean, this is a sprawling topic. I think of a thousand directions to go, but no, I'm feeling good that we got this far.
EMILIE: I feel great about the arc of the conversation. And you're the most cogent, four week postpartum parent I've ever spoken to in my life. So I'm impressed. Well, Zoë where can my listeners learn more about you and keep up with your work?
ZOË: Oh, thank you for asking that. I actually published my first ungated piece, so there's a piece that I wrote that's geared towards the general audience, and it has, I hope a clear title Is Pay Transparency Good. I think you've been drawing on some of the work there. It summarizes many of the pieces that we are discussing, and it's free to the public. So there is no paywall. So I hope if people are interested in either pursuing the research side of things or the policy side of things that they check it out.
EMILIE: And where can folks find that? I mean, is there a URL? I mean, I can drop a link in the show notes.
ZOË: Oh, thanks very much. They can either go to my website, www.ZoëCullen, my name, .com, and it's linked there under research, or they can go to the Journal of Economic Perspectives webpage. And there are many interesting topics covered, and pay transparency would be one of them.
EMILIE: Amazing. Well, I'll drop that link to your website, zoecullen.com, in today's show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I really appreciate it.
ZOË: Yeah, this is really good. So cheers.
EMILIE: Thank you for doing it. For links to everything Zoë and I just discussed, head to bossedup.org/episode 444. That's bossedup.org/episode444. And now, I want to hear from you. Are you living in a part of the world that has pay transparency laws on the books? How do you feel about how they're being implemented and how they're impacting your own choices when it comes to crafting a plan for your career? Or are you living in a place that does not have wage transparency laws on the books? And if so, how are you navigating, solving for those information frictions that Zoë described to gain as much power through gaining knowledge as you can.
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Let's keep the conversation going, as always, in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook, or in the Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose. And together, let's lift as we climb.
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