Praying to the Law

I get into a lot of discussions about gender equality, as you can imagine. I mostly relish them, as I should given this work is my key mission in life. But there are some things that I hear people say on this subject that I very much do not relish - firstly because I have heard them way too many times, secondly because they are anywhere from misguided to inaccurate to downright untrue and unhelpful.

I won’t bore you with them all here (not least because I will bore myself by having to mention them) - if you’re interested and want to avoid embarrassing yourself by saying them, many of them are on the first page of Chapter 1 of Why Men Win At Work - ‘Yes, it is an issue.’ But there is one that is making me particularly irritable and ranty at the moment, which is this chestnut: ‘Gender Pay Equality doesn’t exist because it’s against the law’.

This is top of mind for many right now because of the EU Pay Transparency Directive that requires companies to disclose information about the gender pay gap and enters national law in June 2026. Do I think this is a good thing? Yes, absolutely I do: secrecy about salary levels is the key tool companies use to avoid paying people more than they need to.

But do I think this will solve the gender pay gap issue? Absolutely not. Pray to the Law if you want to, but in itself it won’t fix this. The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963 and here we are over 60 years later with an average 15% gender pay gap (and, yes, we do see a gap when we look apples to apples at men and women doing comparable jobs/days/hours).

To solve a problem, you need to first understand why it happens - and you need to care about solving it because you think it’s important. If you simply impose a law to monitor and punish you won’t solve it, you will just see people doing everything they can to avoid the monitoring and punishing (which is exactly what we do see in response to attempts to monitor the gender pay gap).

What we need first and foremost is for the leaders in companies to care about gender equality (because it is good for business) and to understand that not paying women and men equally for the same work is going to get seriously in the way of ever achieving it (not least because it really pees women off and when they find out it makes them leave, which they really shouldn’t want brilliant women to do). Then we need them to understand WHY it is happening, even despite their best intentions - which means understanding all those invisible, unconscious forces in the workplace that convince us that men are better performers (even when they’re not). We need them to understand The Invisible Power of Culture. The Competence vs Confidence Equation. The Umbrella Theory. The Time Gap. We need them to have the epiphany about how all this and more leads them to pay men significantly more than equally (sometimes more) competent women.

Because when the leaders in companies understand all this, they will WANT to close their gender pay gap. They will WANT to track their employees’ salaries - because this will help them close the gap, not because the law tells them to.

So please let’s stop Praying to the Law to fix the gender pay gap and start doing the work to get to the heart of why it happens and what we need to do differently. It’s the only way things are ever sustainably solved in the end.