Canada's University Salary Disclosure Laws — Public 'Sunshine' Lists and a 20–40% Narrower Faculty Gender Pay Gap

Between 1996 and 2016, six Canadian provinces (British Columbia, Manitoba and Ontario in 1996; Nova Scotia 2012; Alberta 2015; Newfoundland and Labrador 2016) required public-sector employers, including universities, to publish the names and salaries of employees above a threshold (from C$50,000 in early BC/Manitoba rules to C$100,000–125,000 elsewhere).
Baker, Halberstam, Kroft, Mas and Messacar used administrative data covering most Canadian faculty and an event-study design exploiting staggered adoption and variation in exposure across institutions and departments. Published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (2023), they find the laws reduced the gender pay gap by approximately 20–40 percent. The Statistics Canada working-paper version reports a 2.2–2.4 percentage-point reduction, roughly 30% of a 7–8% baseline gap.
The mechanism is a caution for policy designers: salaries fell on average by 1–3 percentage points, and the gap narrowed mainly through slower salary growth for men rather than faster growth for women. The effect concentrated in unionised universities, where female wages rose by roughly 1 percentage point; it was close to zero in non-unionised ones, suggesting collective grievance procedures translate transparency into correction.
The evidence is strong for academic staff in one country; it does not show effects in the private sector or on hiring. It is a useful complement to job-posting and employer-reporting regimes: it tests transparency of individual pay outcomes, not aggregate gap reports.

Read the full analysis: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20210141