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The government has announced a new salary transparency requirement in hopes of closing gaps in equality. But does the initiative reflect the true price of getting a job in the UK?
There are few words more irritating than ‘competitive salary’. It is a description that manages to sound both promising and entirely uninformative, like being told a restaurant serves award-winning food without being allowed to see the menu. For anyone looking for work, it’s also an invitation to enter a negotiation without knowing the rules.
But that may soon change. Andy Burnham announced last week that it will become a legal requirement for employers to disclose salary information in job advertisements. It’s a move intended to tackle persistent pay inequalities, particularly between men and women.
According to the Prime Minister, who shared the news from his official social media accounts, if a company wants someone to work for it, it should have to say how much it intends to pay them. What’s more interesting is what this small administrative adjustment might reveal about the way we value work, and who gets to decide its price.
When an advertised role comes without a salary, applicants are left to calculate their worth against a set of largely invisible expectations. Those with industry contacts or an existing understanding of what their peers earn have an advantage, and women have historically been more likely to lose out. It’s this gender inequality that the PM hopes to tackle with new rules.
As Penny East of the Fawcett Society has argued, concealed salaries leave women negotiating in the dark, making it harder to identify discrepancies or challenge unequal treatment. An employer who knows what a candidate earned previously, or what they’re willing to accept, has considerably more information at their disposal than the person sitting opposite them.
The resulting imbalance can follow someone throughout their career. A modestly lower starting salary is rarely just a modestly lower starting salary; it can become the foundation on which subsequent pay rises and promotions are calculated.
Last year, research from the employment website Indeed found that just over half of online job advertisements included salary information, with the proportion declining as the labour market cooled. More recent research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that fewer than half of employers consistently published salary ranges, while fewer than one in five always disclosed a specific figure. The absence of a number, in other words, has become an accepted feature of the recruitment process.
The change could be particularly consequential for young people, too. Finding a first job has become increasingly difficult in the face of AI systems and automated feedback. Some application platforms now use artificial intelligence to screen candidates, adding another layer of opacity to an already opaque process.
It’s absurd to expect applicants to provide intimate details of their professional ambitions while withholding the most basic information about the job itself.
Knowing the salary before applying would at least allow candidates to make a more informed decision about where to direct their energy. For someone entering the labour market without the benefit of professional connections or family members who can explain the conventions of a particular industry, a published salary range offers a useful point of reference. It also makes it harder for employers to exploit the inexperience of applicants who may not yet know what their skills are worth.
Getting a first job should involve learning how to do the work, not learning how much less you might have agreed to do it for. But naturally, the government’s new proposal has attracted some reservations. Employment Hero, an HR platform serving smaller businesses, has argued that pay transparency isn’t as simple as typing a number into an advertisement. Smaller employers may not have formal salary bands, while publishing pay information could give competitors an opportunity to poach existing staff.
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