Gender pay transparency mechanisms: Future directions for South Africa

DOI: 10.17159/sajs.2020/6772

Keywords: women's pay, gender wage gap, gender policy This study was based on publicly available data on the Internet in English. Data constitute digital literature found on webpages and in reports and documents collected from websites of legislative and governance bodies, utilising the keywords 'gender pay gap public reporting' and 'gender pay gap transparency'. Two main documents provided the springboard for specific country research: the 2018 DLA Piper Report16 and the 2017 European Commission Report17. The 16 countries (excluding South Africa) selected to form part of this study had some form of legislated gender wage transparency obligation allocated to employers operating in those countries. The countries are: Canada (federal), Australia (Commonwealth), Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom (UK), and countries identified by the European Commission (EC) of the European Union (EU) as having implemented a form of gender wage gap reporting in terms of its 2014 Recommendation.18 Although 'great accuracy cannot compensate for inaccessibility'19, we attempted to mitigate the possibility of missing important country data by doing an additional Internet keyword search using the words "gender pay gap" OR "gender wage gap" AND the name of each of the 192 countries that are recognised by the United Nations as member states20. Country-level data are provided in Supplementary tables 1-3. India, Peru and Japan were added to the country data as Supplementary table 3, as they have initiated equality reporting measures. The United States of America does not feature in this comparison, because, despite plans to introduce a reporting mechanism, the Trump presidency has put these plans on the back burner.16 In addition, we consulted library databases ISAP Sabinet, Jutastat and SA ePublications to supplement our Internet searches.

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