Various reports from past surveys and studies have shown that pay secrecy at the workplace is a major contributor to gender inequality in many organizations. When pay secrecy is in place, employers can comfortably hide behind it and discriminate certain employees in terms of salaries, based on gender or nationality, especially foreign tutors.
With pay secrecy, employers can pay workers the way they please, without having to justify the payment to the employees. Regarding this, the employers' decision could be based on conscious or unconscious biases and stereotyping that would greatly affect pay decisions. In such cases, women and foreigners teaching abroad could end up receiving way less payments than they deserve.
The Case for Pay Transparency
The best and only way to tackle this is by advocating for total pay transparency in organizations. Employees should have the freedom to have access to their own and colleagues' accurate and transparent pay scale details. Eliminating pay secrecy features huge significance for women as it eliminates secret reinforcements of discrimination.
Researchers have established that pay transparency is an effective way to close pay gaps and end any form of inequality in organizations. Pay transparency closes inequality gaps by supporting individual worker action or reaction, as well as spark pressure from the public to end inequalities at workplaces.
Exposing Structural Inequalities
Besides pay gaps at workplaces, most organizations also have other persistent structural inequalities. When pay secrecy is in place, the structural inequalities can thrive as employers can easily hide them with myriad explanations. However, when wages are kept transparent in an organization, it becomes harder to hide structural inequalities, therefore they're easily eliminated.
Transparency and Motivation
Additionally, research has also established that employees are more motivated at the workplace when pay transparency is in place. An economist at U.C.L.A, Dr. Emiliano Huet-Vaughn ran a study in 2013 that established that workers are more productive when there is pay transparency. “Without knowing what other workers' salaries look like, it naturally becomes harder to make the case that one is suffering a form of pay discrimination,” Dr. Huet-Vaughn says.
It is clear that when pay secrecy is eliminated, biased pay gaps and other structural inequalities go with them. This greatly protects women and foreign tutors working abroad against discrimination and any form of inequality.
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