Progress toward closing the gender pay gap, globally, is egregiously slow. This isn’t for lack of trying: Many companies and governments have gender equity high on their agendas and are making concrete efforts to solve it, launching pay reviews and implementing policies. It’s not working all that well, though.
For example, since 2017, the UK has mandated that companies with more than 250 employees report their pay gap. This should be a deterrent to wage disparity between genders. But as the second year of reporting rolls round, we’ve already learned that several companies—including parts of HSBC and Virgin Atlantic—have gone backward.
