Pay transparency laws are backfiring—they’re mostly just giving raises to men and college grads, not the people they were meant to help.
SSRN · March 18, 2026 · 6332818
The Takeaway
Laws requiring companies to post salary ranges were intended to close the gender and race pay gaps. Instead, the data shows that the biggest winners were male and college-educated workers, suggesting that transparency helps those with the highest bargaining power more than it helps those at the bottom of the pay scale.
From the abstract
Many major US jurisdictions have implemented pay transparency laws that require firms to advertise wage offers in vacancy postings. Using data on the near universe of job postings and representative survey data in a difference-indifferences framework, we find that these laws increased the fraction of postings with wage information by 24.7 percentage points. This translated to average real wage increases of 3.2%-4.4% in Colorado and 0.6%-1.3% in California and Washington. We further consistently