Pay transparency rules require employers to publish salary ranges or report aggregate pay figures. Gaps tend to narrow under them and rarely close, and the reasons sit in how the measurement works.
What a published gap measures
A headline pay gap usually compares the middle or average earnings of two groups across a whole organisation. It describes the shape of the workforce rather than the rate attached to any one job.
A firm can pay identically within every role and still report a wide gap, because the groups sit differently across the grades. The figure is a composition measure before it is anything else.
Adjusted figures compare people in similar roles with similar experience, and they are always smaller. Each adjustment removes a difference that may itself be the product of unequal access.
Bands are wide enough to absorb difference
Posted salary ranges are bands, not prices. A band spanning a third of its own midpoint leaves ample room for two people hired into the same role to be paid differently.
Employers set the band to cover several years of progression and a spread of candidate profiles. Publication reveals the boundaries without revealing where inside them any individual actually sits.
Where a rule requires the range genuinely on offer rather than a nominal one, bands tend to tighten. The drafting detail changes the effect more than the existence of the rule does.
Starting pay carries forward
Most pay systems raise salaries by a proportion of the current figure. A difference set at hiring is preserved and magnified by every later increase rather than corrected by it.
Asking candidates for their previous salary imports a gap from one employer to the next. Several jurisdictions now restrict that question, though the scope of the restriction differs considerably.
Employers who periodically re-benchmark everyone against the current band interrupt the compounding. That exercise is costly, which is why it usually runs in cycles rather than continuously.
Reporting duties stop at a threshold
Many disclosure regimes apply only above a headcount, so smaller employers publish nothing at all. A substantial share of the workforce therefore sits outside the reporting population entirely.
Duties also differ in what they demand. Some require a single figure, others a breakdown by quartile, seniority or contract type, and coarser reporting conceals the structure that explains the number.
Penalties are generally attached to failing to publish rather than to the size of the gap. Compliance becomes a filing exercise unless something else creates pressure to act on the result.
What actually moves the figure afterwards
Publication works mainly by giving employees, applicants and reporters a basis for comparison. The pressure it creates is reputational and operates over years rather than within a single reporting cycle.
Employers who respond substantively usually change promotion criteria, part-time progression and hiring pipelines, since those determine composition. Adjusting individual salaries alone leaves the underlying distribution intact.
Because these requirements are set nationally or sub-nationally and are revised often, what an employer must publish in one place says little about the position anywhere else.