So to kick us off, I'd like to tell you a story about monkeys, but I promise it tells us something about pay.
It is a real study, run at Emory University in Atlanta and published in Nature back in 2003, under the rather perfect title 'Monkeys reject unequal pay'.
Two capuchin monkeys are side by side in separate cages. They are given a simple job: hand a small pebble back to the researcher, and they get paid for it with a slice of cucumber. And to begin with, they both get cucumber. Both perfectly happy, doing the task over and over, scoffing away.
Then the researcher changes one thing. She keeps paying the first monkey in cucumber, but she starts paying the second one with a grape. Same job, but a grape. And a grape, if you are a capuchin, is the good stuff.
The first monkey has watched all of this. So it does its task again, hands over its pebble, and gets, well, another slice of cucumber. The very same cucumber it was perfectly happy with a minute ago.
And it loses it. It refuses to take part, and it throws the cucumber straight back at the researcher. Nothing about its own pay has changed. What changed is that it saw the one next door get the grape.
That reflex, the sting the moment someone beside you gets more for the same work, is not a modern workplace complaint. It is older than money, older than language, old enough that we share it with a monkey holding a pebble. Our brains treat being paid unfairly as a genuine threat, not a passing grumble, and we do exactly the same thing ourselves.
In the human version, a game economists call the ultimatum game, people will routinely turn down free money rather than accept a split they find insulting. We would honestly rather walk away with nothing than be treated as worth less than the person beside us.
So it has always struck me as slightly odd that we treat pay fairness as if it were mostly a spreadsheet problem. Because as any capuchin could tell you, it was never really about the number.
Where we are today
So 2026 is important in pay fairness terms because on 7th June the EU Pay Transparency Directive reached the point where member states were meant to have written it into national law. In plain terms, it asks employers to be far more open about pay: to put a salary or pay range on the job ad and to stop asking candidates what they earned before, amongst other things. And here in the UK, the government has just opened its own consultation on equal pay and pay discrimination, heading in the same direction.
Now, whether it is your problem yet depends on where you employ people. If you have staff in the EU, the directive already applies to you. If you are UK-only it does not, at least not yet, though the consultation shows the UK moving the same way, and in parts further: it looks at extending equal-pay protection beyond sex to race and disability, and at a dedicated body to enforce it rather than leaving individuals to bring their own claims.
So fair pay is a hot topic right now that we need to understand more fully to assess what it means for our EVPs and how we talk about it through our Employer Brands. Not least because the impact of people feeling unfairly paid is significant. In ADP's 2025 People at Work research, across nearly 38,000 workers, the people who feel unfairly paid are less engaged, less resilient, less likely to trust their leadership and more likely to leave. And over 1 in 4 (27%) said their pay was not fair for the work they do.
But pay fairness is not a simple, pop a neat definition 'in a box and put a bow on it' topic, and it is definitely not confined to transparency around the numbers. So here's how I make sense of it, where the transparency part sits, where it falls short and why. I think of pay fairness as having five yardsticks that are being weighed up in the brain at the same time.
Five yardsticks of pay fairness
Comparison with peers
So this is the capuchin's yardstick, that we just learned about. It's probably the oldest and maybe the strongest of the five, because we cannot help judging our own effort-to-reward against someone else's.
Behavioural researchers have names for it, 'equity theory' and 'inequity aversion', but you already know it in your gut: being underpaid relative to the person next to you corrodes goodwill out of all proportion to the actual pounds, euros or dollars involved. ADP's data shows it clearly. Women were more likely than men to feel unfairly paid (28% against 23%), and the feeling widens as people get older.
The most formal version of this comparison is playing out in the UK courts right now. In the equal-pay tribunals, shop-floor retail work has been judged to be of equal value to higher-paid warehouse work, mostly-female roles measured against mostly-male ones. Next found out what that can cost: it lost an equal-pay case in 2024 after a tribunal rejected market rates as a justification for the gap, with the payout reported at more than £30 million. Similar claims involving Asda, Tesco and Morrisons are in tribunal right now, covering tens of thousands of workers between them. Each is a court doing, at industrial scale, exactly what the capuchin does in its cage: setting two people's reward side by side and ruling whether the gap between them can stand.
The value of the role
This is the one people mean when they say a job is underpaid for what it is, and it is not abstract.
Mercer's 2026 research puts a number on it: 54% of employees say the most important thing their employer could do on pay is reward their unique or in-demand skills.
Think of nursing. The average nurse's basic pay was around £41,431 in June 2025, and while that edged up a little in real terms on the year before, it is still down about 2.2% in real terms over the past decade.
Now, few people would argue a nurse's work has become worth less over ten years, yet measured against that yardstick the pay has drifted. And when a role is widely felt to be underpaid against its value, the risk is not only that people leave. It is that younger people, weighing up whether it is worth starting, decide it is not.
What the pay does to your life
So, this is where the picture sharpens. Mercer found the same worry topping the list: 52% say their single biggest concern about the future of work is pay not keeping pace with the cost of living.
Felt unfairness rises steadily with age, and ADP found the same pattern two years running. Set two of their findings side by side. A visible pay rise in the last year made people more than 2.3 times more likely to say their pay was fair. And yet the workers least likely to have had a rise, and least optimistic about getting one, were the oldest, the very group who already feel the least fairly paid. So the people who feel it most are the least likely to get the one thing that most shifts the feeling.
And at the lowest end the stakes are not only financial: 78% of workers paid below the real Living Wage say being paid it would improve their physical and mental health. So, fairness here is a health question, not just a pay one.
The total reward you cannot see
Base pay is only part of what someone receives from their employer, but the pension, the bonus, the shares, the healthcare and the rest are often invisible to the person actually receiving them. So they end up judging their fairness against a number that understates the whole. This yardstick sits a little differently from the others, because it is largely in the employer's gift to put right.
How the pay was decided
Now this one is really interesting because it isn't really about the size of the number at all and so easy to miss. It is about how that number was arrived at, whether the process behind the pay was fair, and whether people can actually see how it works.
Behavioural researchers call this 'procedural justice', and it is quietly powerful: people will accept an outcome they do not love if the process that produced it was fair and clearly explained. You can be paid a perfectly defensible amount and still feel short-changed when the logic underneath is a black box. This is the yardstick that "pay transparency" speaks to least of all, because a number on a page says nothing about how it was set.
And this is the very ground the UK has just stepped onto. The government's July 2026 consultation on equal pay and pay discrimination is, in large part, about process rather than the headline number. It proposes an enforcement unit meant to take the weight off individual workers, and a duty on employers to put pay in the advert or share it before an interview. As the reward specialist Victoria Milford from Reward Heads puts it, transparency of policy and process can be more important than the numbers themselves. Publish the number before the logic underneath is sound, the grading, the policy, the way pay decisions actually get made, and you have simply made the cracks visible.
A word from the shop floor
I spent the first chunk of my career in retail, at M&S, Boots and Currys, and I have a soft spot for it. Retail is a great leveller. You can build a real career from any background, no degree required, and I watched people do exactly that. The weekend peak shifts are hard because they don't always fit neatly around a home life, but there is a camaraderie and a satisfaction in the impact you have on customers that is genuinely warming.
Retail has never been a top payer, and I am not pretending otherwise. But when pay decisions drift out of step with the rising cost of living, and a sense of injustice about pay starts to settle in, it does put young people off. And that matters well beyond any one shop floor, because retail is the UK's largest private-sector employer, something like one in ten of us. So it is not just an issue for hard-working shop assistants up and down the country, it is an issue for our economy.
So, what's ours to do?
Let's first look at where pay transparency measures actually land against the five yardsticks.
It reaches maybe three of them, and only ever as information: the right to compare with peers, the equal-value principle, and, in the newer reforms, a nudge toward explaining how pay is set. It never touches what pay does to your life as the cost of living climbs, or the package no one can see. And even where it does reach, it hands people a number, not a feeling.
Which is a problem, but not a hopeless one, because the moment you stop seeing fairness as a single number, a surprising amount of it turns out to be within reach. And most of it lands on our desks to actually do as part of our EVPs and Employer Brands.
Start with the front door, the job ad. Hays found that 80% of employees value pay transparency, and that nearly half (46%) do not believe their own organisation is consistently open about how pay and pay rises are set. Put a salary range on the ad and you reach the 89% of workers who say a shown salary makes them more likely to apply; leave "competitive" in its place and, increasingly, it reads as having something to hide. But a published band is only the opening move. It invites the fairness conversation. It does not settle it.
Then there is the braver kind of transparency. An employer that already pays at the top of the market loses nothing by being open about its rates, so "we are transparent" and "we pay well" get conflated. The more honest, more interesting story is the employer who decides to publish even when they are not the top payer, because they've decided it is the right thing to do for their organisation. Take retail again: actual rates are hard to find on the ads, and that is part of the point, because retail is repeatedly named among the least pay-transparent sectors, so a retailer who shows the number is going against the grain of its own industry.
And make the whole package visible, because that is fairness work too, not a benefits-page afterthought. Aviva do something quite clever here: their careers site has a Total Reward calculator where you type in a salary and it builds out the full picture, including an employer pension worth up to 14% of salary depending on grade, so you can see how much of your reward sits beyond base pay. Being shown the full value is a lever, not a comms nicety.
Underneath the tactics, though, the real shift is in where we look. Our job is to make the invisible visible, both the package people cannot see and the process behind the number they cannot see either. And to read the felt-fairness map, not just the gap report...where does pay feel least fair, and to whom? The org-wide average cannot tell you. The people lowest down, and the roles the world quietly treats as underpaid for their worth, can. That is a question we should be asking and surfacing to our leadership teams.
Because pay transparency is just the trigger. Fairness is the real issue, and publishing a report is only where it starts.
Which leaves those of us the law does not reach yet with a real choice: wait until it makes us, or look at pay fairness now, against what our organisation says it actually values, and, if we conclude it is the right thing to do, act on it before we are made to.
If this is the kind of thinking you would like more of, it began life in The EVP Edit, my round-up of the top five things I see shaping EVP, culture and employer brand each quarter.
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All sources verified as at 27 July 2026.
ADP Research (2025). People at Work 2025: A Global Workforce View, Pay Equity chapter (pp. 70 to 73).
ADP Research (2026). People at Work 2026: A Global Workforce View, Older Workers theme (pp. 18 to 19).
European Commission and Council of the EU. Pay transparency, Directive (EU) 2023/970 (salary or range to applicants; no pay-history questions; right to average pay data by sex for work of equal value; gender pay gap reporting with joint assessment where an unjustified gap exceeds 5%). Transposition deadline 7 June 2026.
Hays UK (2025). Fair pay, fair play: the case for salary transparency, drawing on the Hays 2025 Salary and Recruiting Trends Guide.
Totaljobs (2026). UK Industry Salary and Benefit Trends 2026 (89% of workers more likely to apply when a salary range is listed; survey of 3,000 UK workers, November 2025).
Aviva Careers. Our benefits: the Total Aviva Rewards calculator (employer pension up to 14% of salary, depending on grade).
House of Commons Library. NHS pay and pensions (briefing CBP-10374). Average FTE nurse basic pay £41,431 in June 2025; down 2.2% in real terms since June 2015.
PwC (2026). Women in Work Index 2026 (UK gender pay gap 13.1% in 2024; OECD average 12.4%; UK 32nd of 33 nations for progress since 2020, p.13).
Mercer (2026). Global Talent Trends 2026, p.34 (54% say the most important pay action is rewarding unique or in-demand skills; 52% say their biggest future-of-work concern is pay not keeping pace with the cost of living).
Living Wage Foundation, supported by the Health Foundation (2026). From Good Work to Good Health (polling of 1,500 workers paid below the real Living Wage; 78% expect earning it to improve their physical and mental health).
Victoria Milford, Reward Heads (23 September 2024). Roadmap to Pay Transparency for UK organisations.
UK equal-pay litigation, reported contemporaneously (Next, 2024; Asda, Tesco and Morrisons, 2026). Used as colour, reported.
British Retail Consortium, written evidence to Parliament (ULS0020, UK Labour Supply). Retail as the UK's largest private employer, around 9.3% of UK jobs, roughly one in ten.
Office for Equality and Opportunity (Cabinet Office). Equal Pay and Pay Discrimination consultation, published 14 July 2026 (closes 27 October 2026).
Brosnan, S. F. and de Waal, F. B. M. (2003). Monkeys reject unequal pay. Nature, 425, 297 to 299.
Behavioural frameworks named at reference level: procedural and distributive justice (Leventhal; Thibaut and Walker); inequity aversion (Fehr and Schmidt); equity theory (Adams); the ultimatum game (Guth et al.); SCARF fairness domain (Rock).