Is pay transparency closing the gap?

When BC Hydro filed its first pay transparency report, the numbers weren't flattering. As one of the first employers in B.C. required to report, the utility also had the largest gender pay gap among the province's big Crown corporations, says Carolynn Ryan, senior vice-president, people and CHRO.

"[It’s] disconcerting, but we wanted to have the chance to explain why that was."

Four years in, the gap is narrowing. According to BC Hydro's fiscal 2025/26 report, women earned 89 cents in mean hourly pay for every dollar earned by men, up from 86 cents in its first report for fiscal 2022/23. The median figure was 84 cents.

Ryan sees value in simply putting the numbers out there, describing a philosophy she learned long ago: if you don't count us, we don't count.

"Just sharing where we're at really opens that conversation to ‘We understand that there's a discrepancy and here's what we're doing about it.’ It really builds that inclusivity."

New rules take effect in B.C.

As of Nov. 1, 2026, provincially regulated employers in British Columbia with 50 or more employees must prepare and publicly post an annual pay transparency report, the final step in a phased rollout under the province's Pay Transparency Act.

Reporting has been phased in by employer size since 2023, when the B.C. government and six of the largest Crown corporations were first required to report. Employers with 1,000 or more employees followed in 2024, and those with 300 or more in 2025.

Of the roughly 700 employers required to report by November 2025, about 64 per cent met the requirement, according to the province.

B.C. is one of several provinces with pay transparency rules. Prince Edward Island has required pay information in public job postings since June 1, 2022, and Ontario's job posting rules took effect this year. New Brunswick's Pay Transparency Act received royal assent on June 12, 2026; its job posting requirement is in force, while reporting obligations for employers with 50 or more employees will come into force at a later date.

Is pay transparency making a difference?

The B.C. government says the measures are having an effect. Its third annual Pay Transparency Report, released June 1, 2026, found that B.C.'s gender pay gap narrowed from 18.4 per cent in 2022 to 14.5 per cent in 2025, with women earning 85 cents on average for every dollar earned by men.

As of March 2026, 81 per cent of B.C. job postings on Indeed included pay information, compared with 56 per cent across Canada.

But not everyone is convinced the reports are changing much beyond the paperwork, particularly at smaller employers.

"Is it really closing the gap? Well, if you look at a number of the pay transparency reports, it gives you good data for sure, but it's not solving the issue," says Kristi Searle, founder and CEO of Peoplebiz Consulting in Vancouver.

Searle's biggest concern is that employers weren't consulted on the legislation and many don't understand what it is meant to achieve.

"It becomes like a compliance thing as opposed to trying to solve the issue of pay transparency," she says.

‘It’s a box-ticking exercise’

Large employers, with sizable HR departments, already have salary structures and track their numbers, she says. The gap is among smaller organizations where HR is handled off the side of someone's desk.

Looking at the B.C. reports, Searle is skeptical.

"It's a box-checking exercise, and there's some good information, of course, but again, it's the larger organizations that have been doing it all along."

The reporting itself is another sore point. Most organizations with a good HR information system already hold their compensation data, she says, but many of those systems are U.S.-based and may not be built to capture Canadian pay transparency requirements, so employers end up producing a second report in the government's format.

"It shouldn't be labour-intensive,” says Searle.

The B.C. Chamber of Commerce has raised similar concerns about the expansion. It also noted that because the regulation requires data to be suppressed where a gender category has fewer than 10 employees, many smaller employers' reports may contain little actionable information.

Telling the story behind the numbers

Ryan says explaining the gap means going beyond the required data. The company wants both the public and its own employees, particularly women, to understand the underlying issue and what BC Hydro is doing about it. Many other employers, she says, simply report what the data shows.

The report states that men and women at BC Hydro are paid the same for doing the same jobs, with union rates set by collective agreements and minimal differences in average hourly pay between men and women across non-union salary grades.

The gap, it says, comes from women being underrepresented in higher-paying technical and skilled trades jobs. Only two per cent of BC Hydro's power line technicians are women, while 91 per cent of its field service administrators are women, and, on average, a field service administrator earns 69 cents for every dollar a power line technician earns. The report also notes that only 18 per cent of engineers in B.C. are women.

"Our issue is representation," Ryan says. "We have more men in jobs that pay more."

The same pattern shows up in overtime. Among employees who received overtime pay, women earned 24 cents for every dollar earned by men, and men averaged 328 overtime hours compared with 89 for women, largely because about 95 per cent of unionized trades employees, who work most of the overtime, are men.

"We're sharing the reality, but our work is really on the representation, really trying to get more women interested in the jobs that we have that pay more,” says Ryan.

That work includes school-based STEM outreach to girls, a leadership development program that has involved about 1,000 women since 2015, a conference for women in trades and field roles, and a women's network that has been active for more than 20 years.

Salary structure comes first

For Susan Tang, vice-president and pay equity lead at Gallagher in Toronto, agrees that employers need to be able to tell employees why they are paid what they are paid.

That starts with the salary structure, which Tang describes as one of the most important elements of any compensation program. It rests on two components: internal equity, which means ranking or evaluating jobs within the organization using objective criteria, and market pay, which tells the employer what it needs to offer to attract and retain people.

The two need to be combined, she says, so the structure has a sound methodology behind it.

Searle says that foundation is often missing. She estimates that perhaps only half of organizations have a salary structure or keep it current, and some municipalities and Crown corporations she works with have structures that haven't been benchmarked in more than eight years.

"That's not good business. So, if you're not dealing with the pay issue, how are you going to be able to close the gap if you're not putting money into salaries and into closing the gap?"

Searle says HR should be reviewing payroll reports monthly to make sure salary increases are being signed off properly. Without that oversight, she has walked into organizations and found a CEO's direct report earning more than the CEO, without the CEO knowing.

"You uncover a hornet's nest of things within the organization."

Fixing it can be expensive. Searle estimates that an organization of about 120 people may need $1 million or more to address its pay gap. Rather than focusing on reporting, she would like to see more employers commit to paying a living wage, sharing their total rewards philosophy, and showing employees where they sit in the salary structure.

When employees compare notes

Posted salary ranges have created new pressures inside organizations, Searle says, because employees can now see what competitors and their own employer are offering for similar roles, often at a time when salary grids have struggled to keep pace with inflation.

"Now you get people coming to you: ‘Oh, I saw that so-and-so posted my exact job,’" she says. "And they use it as a negotiating tactic."

Ryan says BC Hydro does see some of that, but the legislation didn't create it, because people have always talked about pay. As a public sector employer, BC Hydro can't hand out raises without a reason, and it can't always fix internal equity issues, she says.

"We won't talk about someone else's salary with an employee, but we will explain our structure."

BC Hydro always posts a range in job ads but deliberately caps it below the top.

"We don't post to the top of our range. We post to 3/4 because we want to manage expectations," says Ryan.

External candidates can negotiate a starting salary based on experience and skills, and once inside, everyone moves through the same performance matrix within the increases allowed for the public sector. To build awareness about the new rules, the company ran lunch-and-learn sessions on pay transparency, including during its Learn at Work Week, though Ryan says interest has tapered off by the fourth year.

Ongoing education about pay decisions

Tang says a defensible framework is what lets HR answer those questions, including governance around promotions and salary progression that explains where an employee sits in a range and why. Communication is just as important, she says, both to employees and to managers, since employees are most likely to bring pay questions to their manager. Managers, she says, "need to be equipped to be able to answer those questions."

"It's an ongoing education, ongoing communication," she says. "Organizations evolve and jobs would change over time as well."

Pay ranges remain a concern. Searle says many postings are poorly written, with some showing a $50,000 spread between the bottom and top of the range — wide enough that people might leave for a job paying that much more.

Ontario, which began requiring pay information in public job postings from employers with 25 or more employees on Jan. 1, 2026, caps posted ranges at $50,000.

Searle also finds it difficult that employers can no longer ask candidates what they currently earn, because it helps her understand why someone is looking to move. Tang sees it differently, noting that many employers had already stopped asking before the legislation.

"To me, it's not a new approach," she says.

'At least we're talking about it'

Whether the rules are shrinking pay gaps at the employer level is still unclear. Tang says she hasn't yet seen concrete data, though she sees much more attention being paid to pay programs and to making them consistent and explainable.

"I think it should make an impact, but I think time will tell as to what that looks like."

Searle says it still surprises her that, heading into 2027, men are still paid much more than women. But she sees some progress in the fact that the issue is now on executive agendas.

"Have we solved it? No. Are we better? Are we at a better place? Well, at least we're talking about it."