Pay equity

Three ideas people run together

Equal pay: the legal floor, same pay for the same (or equal-value) work, legislated almost everywhere. Pay equity: consistent pay for comparable work across the organisation, the standard audits test. Pay gap: the aggregate difference in average pay between groups, which can be large even where like-for-like equity is clean, because it also reflects who holds which roles. Each needs its own response: equity gaps need remediation, composition gaps need hiring and progression change, and conflating them produces both denial and bad fixes.

The disclosure environment

The reporting net keeps widening: Australia's WGEA publishes employer-level gender pay gaps for large employers (extended to the Commonwealth public sector in 2026, with 500+ employee employers now required to set gender equality targets), pay transparency laws across North America push ranges into postings, and European employers face expanding disclosure obligations. The practical consequence is that organisations no longer control when the conversation happens; the only controllable variable is whether they understand their own numbers before publication does it for them.

Running a real equity review

The working method: group genuinely comparable roles, compare pay within groups (compa-ratios do the standardising), test whether differences are explained by legitimate factors, remediate what is not, and fix the process that produced it, usually unstructured offers and negotiation-driven starting salaries, which reintroduce gaps at the rate the review removes them. Then repeat on a cycle, because equity is a state you maintain, not a project you finish.