In Massachusetts, on average, women who work full-time earn only 84.3% of what men earn. The gap is even larger for some women of color.” Massachusetts and the rest of the country suffer from a severe gender and racialized wage gap, largely due to occupational segregation. Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Legislature attempted to address this problem by passing H.4890 (effective January 1, 2025), which Gov. Maura T. Healy signed into law in July of this year. H.4890 requires employers with 25 or more employees to disclose salary range information in job postings. That transparency could help narrow the wage gap: If women know an employer’s salary ranges, they have more power to negotiate salaries and identify discrimination. However, H.4890 stumbles because of a glaring omission: the Act does not require disclosure of benefits. This undermines the effectiveness of the law because a substantial amount of American compensation is delivered through benefits, an area where sex-based wage discrimination is especially egregious.

Sex-based wage discrimination has been illegal at the federal level since 1963, and illegal in Massachusetts since 1945. Yet the wage gap persists. The problem is that equal pay legislation has generally only been enforced if men and women perform the same work “in the same workplace,” but occupational segregation is responsible for about 42% of the wage gap. Occupational segregation means that women often work in different workplaces than men. Even when men and women are in the same workplace, they often have different jobs. “Women’s jobs” are paid less, even if they require similar skills, effort, and education as “men’s jobs.” If legislation focuses exclusively on correcting wage discrimination within occupations, it misses the broader problem.

Massachusetts is a pioneer for equal pay in many ways. It was the first state to ban wage discrimination on the basis of sex and the first state to prohibit employers from asking questions about a prospective employee’s past salary. It is also one of only a dozen states with a comparable value requirement. Comparable value, sometimes referred to as comparable work, is a broad concept of wage discrimination that begins to explain occupational segregation. The federal equal pay standard is generally understood to only require equal pay if men’s and women’s jobs are essentially equal. Comparable value regimes do not require that jobs be equal; they require equal pay as long as the work is of equal value, and this value is typically determined through standardized job evaluation studies. Although comparable value laws address the problem of underpaid and feminized work, they still tend to limit relief to cases where female workers have the same employer as their higher-paid male counterparts. Again, this is a problem because men and women often work in different workplaces due to occupational segregation.

An illustration of this problem may be helpful. If ACME’s female software developers were paid less than male software developers, that would clearly violate the federal Equal Pay Act. If ACME’s female graphic designers were paid less than the company’s male software developers (even though both jobs require similar levels of skill, effort, and responsibility), that would violate a comparable value regime, but possibly not the federal Equal Pay Act because the men and women in question have different jobs. But if ACME were a graphic design firm with female employees, and those women were paid less than male employees at a nearby software company, AJAX, that pay disparity would likely be remedied neither by equal pay laws nor by a comparable value regime because the employees work for different employers. Even “radical” comparable value regimes leave a gap in pay equality because pay discrimination occurs not just within employers but throughout the economy.

Pay transparency laws are one way to fill this gap. A study in Canada found that pay transparency requirements can close the wage gap by 20-40%. If women can see how much jobs pay, they have more power to negotiate for fairer wages. Pay transparency empowers women to make informed decisions about which jobs to pursue, and it allows consumers and job seekers to hold companies accountable for unfair pay standards. Public sector and unionized jobs tend to have smaller pay gaps, at least in part because there is greater pay transparency. It should be noted that transparency can be leveraged to remedy pay gaps across employers and sectors, not just within a single employer.

While H.4890 takes a step toward closing the wage gap by requiring pay transparency, its effectiveness is limited by its lack of benefit transparency requirements. Benefits make up a significant portion of compensation: in the United States, about one-third of the cost of employer compensation goes toward benefits. Employment benefits can include everything from health insurance to vacation time. If wage inequality is to be remedied, solutions cannot be limited to totals printed on pay stubs, ignoring one-third of compensation. Benefits must also be equal.

As things stand, women are disproportionately deprived of benefits. Gender-based job segregation means that women are overrepresented among low-wage workers, and these workers are significantly less likely to receive employer benefits. Only about one-third of low-wage workers receive insurance or retirement benefits compared to three-quarters of high-wage workers. And even among low-wage jobs, female-dominated jobs typically have fewer benefits. For example, women disproportionately work in food preparation, and “[o]nly 14.4 percent of restaurant workers receive health insurance from their employer, compared to about half (48.7 percent) of other workers.”

Women also receive fewer employment benefits because they are more frequently involved in unpaid care work. Many employment benefit schemes are contingent on time worked or wages earned, but women spend disproportionately less time in the formal workforce due to caregiving responsibilities. As a result, women are more likely than men to work part-time, interrupt their careers, and work fewer years overall. With benefit schemes in place, less time in the workforce often means that women receive few, if any, employment benefits compared to men.

The irony is that women’s caregiving burden makes benefits even more important. If women are socially expected to take on the caregiving, they need benefits such as childcare, paid family leave, or flexible work schedules even more than their male counterparts. In 2021, the Massachusetts Office of Economic Empowerment recognized that the availability of employment benefits affects women’s participation in the workforce. It is not fair that women should be expected to take on caregiving responsibilities. “Gender stereotypes and cultural expectations concretize” women’s disproportionate caregiving burden. But at the very least, legislative approaches should take these existing inequalities into account when designing solutions to the pay gap. Women need better wages and salaries, but they also need better benefits. Benefit transparency can help close the benefits gap.

Benefit transparency should be mandated by law: relying on voluntary benefit transparency is not enough. Some might argue that mandatory benefit transparency is unnecessary because employers want to advertise benefit plans as a way to attract talent. Descriptively, that is not what happens: about 40% of job postings do not include any benefit disclosures. Employers may prefer not to disclose benefits as a way to maintain their bargaining power or to hide subpar benefit packages. The assumption that employers want to use benefits as a way to attract talent also assumes that employers need to attract talented candidates, which may not be true under certain economic conditions or in the era of digital job postings. Often, employers may have more candidates than they need. Expecting voluntary transparency of benefits fails to account for these realities and incentives for employers.

Expecting job seekers to ask employers about benefits packages during the application process is similarly insufficient. There is less public accountability if employers only inform individual job seekers, upon request, about benefits packages. Furthermore, if benefits are not disclosed in job postings, women cannot easily apply for positions with fairer benefits packages. If job seekers are only provided with benefits information upon request, women will be forced to waste valuable time during the already lengthy job search process to track down benefits information.

Demanding transparency in benefits is possible. Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, Washington, and the District of Columbia require employers to disclose benefits during the job application process. The European Union also requires benefits transparency. These existing benefit transparency laws may not be enough (as Professor Samantha J. Prince points out, benefit transparency statutes often only require a cursory description of benefits), but they do show that legally mandated benefit transparency is possible.

H.4890 is a victory for working women in Massachusetts that will likely help close the state’s gender and racialized wage gap, but Massachusetts can do better. If closing the wage gap is the goal, Massachusetts should require benefit transparency in addition to wage and salary transparency. That way, women, particularly women of color, will be helped to achieve truly equal pay and necessary benefits.