By Stephanie R. Thomas, Ph.D.
Pay transparency is a commonly used phrase with a somewhat fluid definition. What does it really mean?
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As it is typically used, there are two meanings for pay transparency: salary disclosure and pay process transparency. To understand salary disclosure, we can look to real world examples.
Salary disclosure
The extreme pay transparency experiment at Google is an example of employee-driven disclosure. Erica Baker, a former engineer at Google, and her colleagues circulated a spreadsheet detailing their names, job titles, and salaries. Ms. Baker described the experiment in a series of Tweets:
“The world didn’t end. Everything didn’t go up in flames because salaries got shared. But s**t got better for some people.”