A Farewell to Pay Transparency

When I started writing about the EU Pay Transparency Directive back in 2023, most HR and compensation leaders had not yet heard of it. Which is why I wrote my Equal Pay for Equal Work book that summer. Because someone needed to explain what was coming before it arrived and give leaders an easy framework to implement it in their company.

That was three years ago. Today, pay transparency has its own ecosystem. Consultants, platforms, advisors, entire practices built around the directive. The topic has found its people, and those people are good at what they do.

Which means my work here is done.

This has been my core principle for a long time: once I’ve said everything I wanted to say on a topic, it’s time to move on. The directive is now in effect (even if only four of the 27 EU member states have completed transposition) and companies are moving ahead, however slowly. They know what needs to happen. There is no shortage of guidance, frameworks, or experts willing to help them get there.

And so, I’m moving on from this newsletter.

Pay transparency will remain part of what I write and speak about, because we haven’t achieved equal pay yet and I’m not walking away from my conviction that we can get there. But the topic will sit within a bigger conversation: the future of pay and compensation, which is where I started and where I’ve always felt most at home. Writing this newsletter on a bi-weekly cadence meant my Pay Time! newsletter got a little neglected. It’s time to fix that.

I hope you’ll follow me there and subscribe to Pay Time!.

I’ll leave every article up here for easy access. You can use them as reference material, share them with your teams, bookmark the ones that helped you think through job architecture or pay gap reporting. I hope you find them useful. I might even write a short article once in a while. And don’t forget to download the free goodies!

And to everyone who read, shared, or wrote me over these three years: thank you. You gave me hope that we will (eventually) consider equal pay the new normal. I hope something here made your work a little easier or gave you the language to make the case internally when it mattered.

Thanks for reading the articles and good luck on your pay transparency journey. You can do this! Anita