While the foundations for redressing gender pay inequality in Aotearoa (New Zealand) were established over half a century ago, significant numbers of women still endure gender-based pay discrimination (Parker & Donnelly, 2020). Historically and comparatively, New Zealand’s gender pay gap is small. However, this gap has refused to close fully despite significant societal changes over many decades and numerous labour market and policy initiatives targeting the gender pay gap (Frey, 2021). The literature has highlighted that legislation requiring employers to deliver pay and employment equity to women is essential if New Zealand is to overcome systemic discrimination against women (Parker & Donnelly, 2020). To end pay discrimination, it is also essential that the work done by women and men is valued comparatively (Oelz, Olney & Tomei, 2013). Gender pay gaps are influenced by social structures such as patriarchy, neoliberalism, capitalism, and colonialism that discriminate against women. Research has found that pay transparency is a tool to identify and address the gender pay gap (Baker, Halberstam, Kroft, Mas & Messacar, 2019; Bölingen, 2022; Frey, 2021; Obloj & Zenger, 2020; Reilly, 2019; Stanberry, 2018). If pay was transparent it would become more challenging for organisations to hide structural inequalities (Research New Zealand, 2020).

This research aimed to discover what role pay transparency has in positive change by exploring participants’ perceptions of pay transparency and the gender pay gap. The purpose of this research was to answer the research question: Is pay transparency key to closing the gender pay gap? Primary research was conducted among Human Resource Managers, policy analysts and policy makers working in the public, private or not-for-profit sectors. Participants were actively engaged in work on the gender pay gap and advocating for gender equal pay. This study contributes to the developing knowledge of gender inequality and focuses on addressing the gap in New Zealand research on the gender pay gap and pay transparency.

Overall, this study found that pay transparency is complicated. This is because of the multiple levels and complexities of gender discrimination within societies and organisations and the fact that pay transparency fails to address the root cause of gender discrimination. Pay transparency is an essential component and one of the tools in the toolkit to combat the gender pay gap, but it will not fix everything. Pay transparency is not significant enough to close the gender pay gap and needs to be combined with other tools or measures including pay gap reporting, auditing systems, policies, and procedures. Furthermore, knowing how to correctly implement pay transparency is crucial. Pay transparency is not a ‘simple’ tool (Frey, 2021), due to differing definitions, access to data, datasets with varying legislation, policy, dataset size, and varying regulations for public, private and not-for-profit sectors within different countries contexts (Chan, 2022; Lewis, Pathak & Galloway, 2018). Therefore, data collection across organisations and countries is inconsistent (Bölingen, 2022) and does not necessarily capture the information required to effect or bring about positive change.