The emotional tidal wave was immediate – livid, disgusted, shattered and, frankly, humiliated – when I was told “because he might be a husband and father one day”. That was what I had just been told by Bob, a male colleague in his 40s, when I asked why a junior male employee was making more than I was for the same job.
For three years, I’d been working in the marketing department of an investment bank in Manhattan and thought my salary was competitive. Before this job, I’d banked five years’ journalism and marketing experience at well-known brands in New York after university graduation.
My new counterpart, let’s call him Mike to save his blushes, was a 21-year-old college graduate with very little work experience but he was being paid more than I was. Not hundreds, but thousands more.
As associates in the high net worth banking division, we had the exact same job role and responsibilities. What was different about me? I was single and he had a serious girlfriend, not that that should matter in salary negotiations; but did it? Maybe he had a relative who worked there? Our college degrees were similar. Was he a shrewd negotiator? It made no sense to me then or now, but it was 1995.
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In 1995, women working full-time in the US earned approximately 71-75 per cent of what men earned, a gap that rightly prompted calls for stronger legislation, such as the proposed Fair Pay Act of 1995, which sought to address wage disparities between different jobs that were equivalent in value, rather than just identical work. It was introduced in April that year but never enacted.
One month later, I had my brief conversation with Bob. What could I say to him? He’d said it in such a matter of fact way. I let those words percolate bitterly through me. It was one of the first times I realised that the world saw me as “less than” simply because I was a woman.
The message was clear: my work and time was not as valued or valuable. My many hours of unpaid overtime, multimedia innovations, quality investor materials and speeches for the CEO and head of sales didn’t matter a whit.
Mike was a really lovely young lad and my salary and appreciation gap certainly wasn’t his fault. Regardless, I stewed about it and said nothing to my colleagues or manager, a woman, who had hired me. My big boss was also a woman, a female leader in the very male-dominated financial industry. She was someone I’d admired but now I avoided her, worried that my fury would spill out. Within a month of my life-changing chat with Bob, I tendered my resignation and moved to Ireland.
‘F’ for business failure
Experiences like this should never happen and, when the EU Pay Transparency directive is implemented on June 7th, they’ll hopefully become less frequent, in Europe at least.
The directive contains far-reaching new measures to reduce the gender pay gap and enforce equal pay for equal work by increasing pay transparency in the workplace and improving access to information. It establishes binding rules to ensure greater openness around pay structures and salary information within organisations.
By mandating transparency in recruitment, pay reporting and employee rights to information, the directive empowers workers, enhances accountability among employers and ultimately fosters fairer and more inclusive workplaces throughout the EU.
Sara Benedí Lahuerta, associate professor at UCD’s Sutherland School of Law, has studied the business impact of pay transparency extensively. “The business case is clear: fair pay improves retention, reduces turnover and attracts talent,” she says.
“Better paid employees are more loyal, productive and more engaged and that’s good for everyone. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to support it.”
Pay secrecy has been a feature of the workplace for too long. Psychological safety – including fairness and transparency – is a key element in building high performing teams and individuals. When employees feel they’re not being treated fairly, trust is broken and motivation suffers.
Women have long suspected they’re been paid less for the same job. This directive will show them exactly how much they’re undervalued by their employers. For some industries with historically large gender pay gaps, there will be a reckoning.
[ Is the new guy earning more than you? New pay rules will reveal the truthOpens in new window ]
Several countries, including the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and, yes, Ireland have been dithering over implementing the directive. They cite administrative, cost and legislative burdens and are delaying full implementation to 2027.
“Some European countries are doing quite well in implementing the directive. Iceland has very advanced pay transparency, Spain is advanced and France to some extent. Other countries have some very interesting tools in place,” Benedí Lahuerta says.
Companies delaying the directive are misreading the room. The European Institute for Gender Equality reported last month that fair pay now ranks as the second most important reason employees stay with their employers. Europe is facing demographic pressure and a tightening labour market – and the Irish workforce is highly mobile – so any business strategy that antagonises half the available talent is commercially foolish.
Employers need to stop pretending that women are just playing at work. Paid work is not our cute little hobby for pin money in between having children and cleaning the house. Women are here to stay – no matter how AI, the TechBros and Christian nationalists are trying to remove us from the workplace – and we deserve to be paid the same as men for the same work. If you have nothing to hide, then show us the receipts by implementing the directive.
The world of work cannot evolve by only rewarding a small segment of the population with the top jobs. Men cannot do it alone. Things move too fast, diversity of experience and thought are what gives many companies their competitive advantage. This week the AI company Anthropic, cofounded by Daniela Amodei with her brother in 2021, became the most valuable in the world at $1 trillion.
Diversity pays dividends. If women participated in the formal economy at rates equal to men 10 years ago, we would have added $12 trillion to global GDP by now, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 27 per cent more likely to outperform their national industry average on profitability. Organisations with the highest proportion of women on their executive committees report a 47 per cent higher return on equity than those with no women at the top table, McKinsey found.
When you pay women less just because they’re women or because they might get married and have children one day, you’re missing out on talent, growth and profit. The World Bank estimated in 2024 that closing gender gaps across the labour market could produce a 20 per cent rise in global GDP.
Delaying the EU Pay Transparency directive is not a neutral act. Governments and companies are making a choice to leave money on the table, to walk away from higher profits and economic success. Instead, they choose to preserve an outrageous historical injustice that systematically undervalues half of Europe’s workforce.
Do these delays indicate that Europe’s 200 million working women will have to wait another generation for equal pay?
Margaret E Ward is chief executive of Clear Eye, a leadership consultancy. margaret@cleareye.ie
