Pay Transparency and The Illusion of Equality

From salary bands that stifle ambition to public spreadsheets that fuel resentment, salary transparency without systemic change does more harm than good. Rather than solving issues like social immobility or pay gaps, it just makes the inequity easier to watch—without fixing it. Because, you know…capitalism.

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not anti-transparency. I like knowing what’s in my food, what’s hidden in government spending bills, and what the guy in 17C is binge-watching so I can silently judge his taste in true crime documentaries and airline wine.

But when it comes to pay transparency? Let’s just say we’ve confused openness with oversharing, and no one seems to know what problem we’re actually trying to solve anymore. Spoiler alert: it’s not salary.

Pay transparency is the corporate equivalent of slapping a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound and wondering why it won’t stop bleeding, or your HCM provider rolling out new “AI” functionality.

It feels good, it looks progressive, and it lets a lot of people feel like they’re doing something.

But if you’re genuinely trying to address social mobility, gender pay gaps, racial inequity, or workplace fairness, putting everyone’s paycheck on blast is, like most DEIB initiatives, an act of futility – what TS Elliot would say is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Kind of like product marketing copy. It’s performative, punitive, and painfully naïve.

Now that you’ve gotten through that painfully long lede, let’s dig in.

The Band Pays On

The argument for pay transparency goes something like this: if we force companies to publish pay bands, post salaries on job ads, and maybe even put everyone’s compensation on a shared spreadsheet, then systemic inequities will be exposed and eliminated. Seems logical. After all, you can’t fix what you can’t see, right?

Except, of course, when what you’re seeing is a tiny sliver of a deeply entangled machine designed to reward the people who built it.

You want to know why you should consider working for an employer? Forget employer branding – candidates really just want to know the salary range (although often, the margin of error is a couple hundred thousand or so, which is compliant, if not particularly illustrative).

Thing is, salary isn’t just a number—it’s in how the system decides who gets what in the first place. That includes things like access to better education, networks, mentorship, confidence gaps, parental leave policies, geographic privilege, biased promotion practices, and about a thousand other factors that don’t fit neatly into a compensation band.

Posting a salary range doesn’t fix any of that. It just gives you one more thing to argue about in Slack.

We’ve spent decades in HR trying to protect employee data. HIPAA, GDPR, data protection training modules no one reads. And yet, in the name of “progress,” we’re now suggesting everyone should know what everyone else makes?

Let’s take a moment to remember that pay isn’t just a number. It’s a marker of social value. It’s tied to our sense of worth, our egos, our sense of fairness, and, let’s be honest, our ability to flex on LinkedIn.

When we push for full transparency, we’re not just fighting for justice—we’re bulldozing the nuance of individual negotiation. We’re punishing ambition under the guise of fairness. We’re taking the one private conversation most employees still have some control over—their own compensation—and turning it into public spectacle.

The result? Resentment, comparison, and a lot of passive-aggressive “must be nice” comments in team meetings.

The Myth of the Meritocracy: An Inconvenient Truth

If we’re being brutally honest (and let’s be real, when am I not), the modern workplace was never a meritocracy, nor was it designed to be. It was built on an anachronistic, Horatio Algeresque lie—that if you work hard, keep your head down, and play nice, you’ll be rewarded accordingly. In reality, performance reviews are political, raises are arbitrary, and bonuses are negotiated over board meetings, beers, or the boys’ room.

Pay transparency doesn’t undo that bias—it just makes it easier to see who the system already favors. You’re still relying on a machine that was built to optimize for conformity, not fairness. Transparency just lets you watch the inequity in real time.

Imagine watching a rigged slot machine with the casing removed. Sure, now you can see how the game is fixed. But you’re still losing your money.

For example, let’s talk a bit more about everyone’s favorite pay transparency initiative: posting salary ranges on job ads.

In theory, this helps candidates know what to expect. In practice, it turns every recruiter into a hostage negotiator.

“Yes, the range is $70K to $120K. No, I can’t tell you where you’d fall. Yes, everyone thinks they’re at the top. No, I don’t control comp. If I did, I would be making a whole hell of a lot more.”

Salary bands are the ultimate corporate compromise: they let employers claim transparency without actually being accountable for fairness. And once those bands are public? Good luck trying to reward over-performance or poach top talent without blowing up your entire org chart.

You’ve just created a bureaucratic ceiling where everyone knows the limits—and no one wants to play anymore. Or, as they used to be referred to in those halcyon days before DOGE, “government jobs.”

The Way Forward: Transparency With Teeth

Here’s the dirty little secret behind most corporate transparency initiatives: they’re not for the employees. They’re for optics. HR and comms teams love a good “we believe in transparency” line on the careers page. It signals virtue without requiring any structural change.

But ask that same company if they’re ready to share equity distribution by demographic. Or promotion velocity across race and gender. Or how many women of color made it to VP level in the last decade.

Crickets.

Because those are the metrics that really matter. And they’re not as pretty. So instead, we settle for “we post pay ranges,” like that’s the summit of social progress.

Well, apart from employee resource groups or unconscious bias training (which, disclaimer, I’m consciously biased against, having seen the associated data).

If we really care about fixing inequity, transparency needs to be a means, not an end.

It’s not about whether people know the numbers. It’s about whether the systems that produce those numbers are fair, equitable, and accountable.

So instead of just showing the receipts, how about:

• Auditing compensation decisions across departments and demographics annually.
• Tying manager bonuses to equitable hiring, retention, and promotion outcomes.
• Investing in coaching and negotiation training for underrepresented employees.
• Actually fixing the promotion criteria that reward likability over results.

And yes, maybe post the salary range too. But only if you’re willing to stand behind how people move within that range and why.

Of course, what the hell do I know? I’m just another broke, mediocre white dude with a blog.

TL;DR: Transparency Won’t Pay the Bills

Transparency is not a solution. It’s a flashlight. And if you’re not ready to do the uncomfortable cleanup that comes after shining that light, then maybe don’t be surprised when people see the mess and leave.

Pay transparency, in its current form, is the corporate equivalent of performative allyship. It looks good on social. It satisfies compliance. But it doesn’t actually help the people it’s supposed to.

If you really want equity? You have to be willing to dismantle the machine. Not just watch it work.

And if that sounds hard, well… maybe it’s time to stop pretending we’re fixing anything at all. Although, in HR, that’s pretty much the only core competency that matters.