Long taboo in France, the thorny issue of pay transparency is becoming part of the debate and its lawyers are gradually gaining ground. But this transparency is just as much a source of tension and concern as it is of considerable enthusiasm and expectations.
But what exactly does " pay transparency" mean? Can it really be applied and how? What intimate and identity, societal, cultural, economic and international questions does it refer to? And finally, is it the key to the future of professional equality? We take stock of all these questions.
First of all, what are we talking about?
A grid, an index finger or something else?
It should be stressed from the outset that when it comes to pay transparency, the tracks are easily blurred as the definitions vary. Between a salary scale that shows remuneration criteria according to diplomas, status, cumulative years of experience, among other criteria ; an index that indicates the average salary gap and total transparency allowing everyone to know how much their colleague earns, the purposes and the pro/con ratio are not the same. Neither for HR, nor for management, nor for employees.
For a radical definition (in the sense of the roots) of transparency
Pay transparency in its strictest sense is therefore neither an index nor a reading grid. It is the provision (within the same company or in free access by all citizens) of the processes and net results of management decisions that are linked to the remuneration of each person.
Why is it now considered by some as a lever for professional equality?
The principle of equal pay for equal work
When, in 1975, almost 60 years after the ILO established the principle of " equal pay for equal work", the European Union adopted its first directive to oblige Member States to put in place provisions "relating to the application of the principle of equal pay for men and women", The inequalities are then glaring.
The reality of wage inequality
But more than forty years later, progress remains disappointing. At Bac+3 or more, the gender pay gap is still 29.4% in France. Among executives, it reaches 22.8%. All these data reveal that the so-called " unexplained " gender pay gap (a euphemism for that it is discriminatory) is between 5% and 7% in France, while the overall gap remains around 20% (depending on the calculation methods). There is an urgent need to find solutions to accelerate the time of equality...
Are women and men equal when it comes to bargaining ?
Another point pleading for transparency is the conditions for negotiating remuneration. Despite the abolition of the " women's wage" in 1945 (a wage that was evaluated according to the needs of the housewife and not the skills and results of the worker), this history has left unconscious traces in our mentalities.
Thus, when women talk about their remuneration, they are more likely to express questions of purchasing power (relating, for example, to the family expenses they have to cover) than to evoke the value they bring to the company they represent in the market. They therefore unconsciously come up against a glass ceiling related to their mental load even before noticing in fact their greatest difficulty in reaching the best-paid professional positions.
For its supporters, transparency would therefore also make it possible to compare one's salary with those of other colleagues doing similar work; to avoid discrimination linked to difficulties in negotiating a salary ; to set up reading grids to assess whether skills are fairly remunerated.
Why does it make you cringe?
Money : taboo of taboos ?
Let's be honest : our culture is full of taboos related to money. That's general. But when we relate it to the individual, what do we realize?
First, that each of us has a different relationship with money, and that the idea that salaries could be revealed makes some of us uncomfortable.
Yes, because the money we earn, what we use it for, how we " live " it on a day-to-day basis also speaks of our position in society, our tastes and our way of life, our " weak spots " and our beautiful values, our convictions and our contradictions, of our psyche, our education, our ambitions in professional life and in the rest of our living spaces, our relationship to self-esteem and what builds or undermines it, etc. In short, to what willingly touches on intimacy and very directly on identity. As a result, salary transparency also means, for some, a form of " undressing " of private life.
From one sector to another, there are great variations in the relationship with money
Then professional cultures invite themselves into the debate : " vocation " professions (care, culture, humanitarian, etc.) are more often indebted to hard pay and more openly turned towards latent functions of work than those related to " food jobs", those that have money at the heart of the activity (finance, for example) or those that operate in a system of " grades " and where remuneration signals the completion of the stages of progression.
As a result, applying cross-sectoral pay transparency is not without questioning... The perceived usefulness and value of certain activities !
Not without morality interfering : those who educate children, care for and comfort the sick, accompany the elderly, work for the integration of so-called fragile groups and find that their pay slip is unsatisfactory, can always take comfort in being on the side of the " essential "... And, in the process, find good reasons to consider the remuneration (real or imagined) of the successful marketer, trader, entrepreneur as indecent...
But are those who earn " their living " in these professions reputed to be remunerative satisfied with their pay alone to give meaning to their work ? The latent functions of work also concern them.
It would obviously be too binary to believe that pay transparency is the envy of the less fortunate and that the preservation of opacity is the envy of the most privileged. The debate indisputably addresses the question of immediate vital needs (starting with having the means to find housing, food, etc. if we refer to Maslow's model) at the same time as our basic needs of existence.
What does " equal work" mean, exactly?
Third level of difficulty : how to evaluate " equal work" ? Especially in a world as complex as ours where there are many professions and functions, a large part of which is said to have not even been invented yet. Not to mention the delicate exercise of estimating the level of " soft skills ", which is much more subtle to define than the panel of traditional skills.
The notion of " work of equivalent value" is proposed to understand the problem. This is an interesting way to move away from the rigid criteria for calculating remuneration based on the background and results of individuals and to enter an era of consideration of direct and indirect contributions to the value created, taking into account the valuable nature of each person's actions in favour of cooperation in the collective, general well-being, the positive effects on innovation of " mistakes " and/or the propensity for serendipity...
What if reviewing the way we calculate salaries created new inequalities ?
But how does all this cost? Opponents of a revision of our remuneration criteria point out, with some relevance, the fact that the vagueness surrounding the possibility of measuring differently can also be a slide towards favouritism... The most opaque there is !
Where the (sea) serpent bites its tail : in the reflection on pay transparency and all that it entails, there are new risks of opacity that hover.
What experiences and are they transferable ?
The " new economy " at the forefront of pay transparency
Salary transparency experiments are nevertheless being implemented : the start-up Buffer displays the salaries of its 80 employees on a file accessible on its website; the Tilkee company plays the game of internal transparency; the fintech Shine unveils a partial salary scale for its 50 employees; the insurer Alan discloses the salary scale of its 175 employees, etc.
The tone seems to be set today by so-called " innovative " companies.
Younger and less pyramidal, most of those who have chosen transparency do not regret it. Among their arguments: less rumor, less jealousy and suspicion between employees, more relevant salary evaluations, an increase in commitment. More uninhibited when it comes to the question of money, the new generations are in favour of a better distribution of resources, smaller wage gaps, greater diversity and better equal pay treatment.
Transfrable experiences in large international groups?
The arguments are convincing and large companies are not insensitive to them. But how can we duplicate these experiences involving a few dozen or hundreds of employees at the level of a group of thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees of different generations, from various cultures...
Not to mention the international issue: the principle of " work of equal value, equal pay" must apply to everyone, regardless of where everyone works. But the same salary does not represent the same thing in terms of purchasing power or in terms of cultural perceptions in France, India, Japan, Nigeria, Norway, Lithuania etc. (And if you really want to add an ingredient to the explosive cocktail, you will also have to take into account exchange rates, among other external fluctuating factors that necessarily have an impact on the value of money).
And while we're at it, let's add one more layer : the subject of data privacy and the various legislation that governs it!
If pay transparency is a possible lever for ega pro, it cannot be the only one
Increased precision in understanding the mechanisms of the glass ceiling
After this broad detour on the complexity of issues relating to money in general, and to the money we " earn " in particular, let's return to our initial question: is pay transparency, if we manage to implement it methodically, a lever for professional equality?
Certainly, a process of at least partial transparency can move the lines, in particular by providing better visibility of the mechanisms leading to the " wage dropout" of women at certain stages of their career : the effects of maternity are well known and today very often taken into consideration by companies (maintenance of increases and bonuses during maternity leave, promotion proposals on return from leave, etc.) ; those of the precariousness of women linked to a marital separation are rising on the agenda of HR departments (their job is not to intervene in the resolution of family conflicts, but risk prevention increasingly integrates the dimension of living conditions and moments of life, by allowing us to slow down for a while without being demoted or ending up in the closet !) ; the Covid crisis has also had the effect of making the issues of sharing domestic tasks, mental load very concrete and initiating a renewal of reflections on the differential of conditions...
All this is not without giving another breath to the paradigms of the subject of the glass ceiling, in which the question of remuneration plays its part.
Giving professional equality every chance by simultaneously activating a variety of levers
In this other breath, there is the understanding, more alert than ever, that gender equality is never based on a single lever but that it must be achieved in the well-orchestrated concordance of multiple types of action : the training of women and men, continuous vigilance with regard to the risks of bias, the support of individual situations by taking into account the parameter of gender but also other issues of inclusion, the need to think about careers over the long term but above all the non-linear time in which they are part (there are times when one is more apt to produce performance, and others less so, without this being able to be read on a single chronological frieze of the " ages of life ")...
So, the time has come to answer the question under debate: pay transparency will not solve everything, but what it raises in terms of useful questions for thinking about the future of work is a fertile ground of rare fertility for innovating in terms of equality policies.
