Inside Business with Ciaran Hancock
Will new pay transparency rules close the gender pay gap for good?
27 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, I'm Ciarán Hancock. Welcome to Inside Business. This week I'll be looking at the EU's new paid transparency directive and what it will mean for Irish employers and their workers. In the second half of the show I'll be talking to Irish Times Washington correspondent Keith Duggan about the new Governor of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh.
Will he be his own man or a patsy for Donald Trump's economic agenda?
Chapter 2: What are the details of the new EU pay transparency directive?
First to pay transparency. A new EU directive requiring employers to slow salary ranges in the workplace and toughen rules enforcing gender pay equality comes into effect on June 7th. However, Ireland is set to miss the deadline with no draft legislation in place.
Nicola Harkin is Head of Employment Law Services at Employers Group IBEC and she joined me in studio to explain how the new rules will work. I began by asking Nicola to explain the key elements of the new EU pay legislation and what it will mean for Irish employers and their staff. Here we go.
So the Pay Transparency Directive, really the aim of it is to work towards achieving better gender equality across the EU. And within it, there's a range of provisions and I probably bucket them into the more straightforward provisions and the very complex provisions. So in the straightforward bucket...
There's a couple of provisions around pre-employment rules, around recruitment, around the provision of job salary information, either in the job ad or prior to interview or otherwise prior to employment. Rules around prohibition of pay secrecy clauses and rules prohibiting employers from asking candidates about current pay or previous pay history.
And then in the probably more administratively burdensome provisions are a lot of provisions around the idea of evaluating all of the work within your organisation and carrying out this job evaluation exercise, which will categorise all of your workers into work of equal value.
And that, you know, within itself will then, I think, create, that's where the real work is for employers in preparing for this directive.
Yeah. Now, this directive is supposed to commit to force on June 7th, but Ireland isn't going to meet that deadline, is it?
It doesn't look like it, no. I mean, the pay transparency bill wasn't included in the priority list for the summer 2026 legislative programme. It is in the programme, but not on the priority list. So, I mean, it's unlikely, but really impossible to see we're a week out, how it could come in on time. But we're certainly not alone on that.
And in fact, most member states will be late in transposing the directive. And I think that's probably reflective of the complexity of the directive and the complexity of really bringing some of those legal provisions into practice. I think the delays across the EU on implementation of the directive is probably reflective of that.
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Chapter 3: Why is Ireland missing the deadline for the pay transparency legislation?
But in the absence of a lot of the legal certainty to be fully prepared, there's only so much they can do. We haven't seen draft legislation yet. The directive says that member states need to provide guidance and toolkits to employers to help them to prepare for the directive. We haven't seen that yet. from the department yet.
We've seen one toolkit come from a European institution around gender equality. So there's still a lot that we don't know. So while organisations are working very hard, we know organisations are putting a huge amount of time, resources and financial investment into preparing for the patron transparency directive.
The reality is, in the absence of certainty and legal certainty about exactly what they must do to prepare, There's only so much they can do and there's a lot that remains to be seen before they can finalise any sort of preparations for the directive.
So when this is implemented and an employer is advertising for a particular role, what will it mean for the employer? What will change? And what does it mean for the employee? So, for example, is the salary level disclosed in this job ad?
Chapter 4: What are the key elements of the EU pay legislation for employers?
Not necessarily. So the job ad will have to be drafted in gender neutral terms. Now, we would have always, or certainly in more recent years, I think in our experience, employers are already doing that. They're drafting and putting the gender neutral language into job advertisements.
What the directive says around salary and salary ranges is that information around the initial pay level or pay range must be given to a candidate either in the job ad itself or or prior to interview or otherwise prior to the commencement of employment. So we did see some draft legislation in a general scheme about a year and a half ago.
And within that general scheme, it suggested that the information would have to be in the job ad itself. In IBEC, we would disagree with that because when you look at the aim of this provision, the aim of this provision is to put candidates into an equal bargaining position when negotiating a possible pay package for a particular role.
The purpose of the provision is not to force businesses to share. For some businesses, it will be commercially sensitive information. So what we will be saying to government is... It's not necessary to gold plate the directive in those terms and it's sufficient to ensure that candidates... So you're lobbying against that? We are lobbying against it having to be in the job act.
But that hasn't been decided upon?
That hasn't been decided upon.
Now it is a pay transparency directive so it would kind of make sense to be transparent about the pay, wouldn't it?
Well, the idea is to be transparent with your workforce about the pay, not necessarily be transparent with all of society or, you know, other businesses about pay. And the purposes of it is pay transparency for the purpose of achieving gender equality. That's the purpose of the directive. So that's why we have to really see what are the aims of the directive.
And then make sure our national legislation are meeting those terms. See, in the Netherlands, they've just published draft legislation, I think today or in the last day or so. And they have said that the information around salary levels will have to be given to candidates prior to the interview. They're not suggesting that needs to be in the job ad itself.
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Chapter 5: How prepared are Irish companies for the new pay transparency rules?
So that's not new. But the gender pay gap is obviously a different animal altogether. And this directive... won't in itself solve the gender pay gap, which is different to equal pay for work of equal value, because the drivers of the gender pay gap are much more diverse than what is purely within the employer's control. We've got the occupational segregation, the gender stereotyping, you know.
the need for it to be influenced even at early educational level. So in order to address the gender pay gap and to achieve the ultimate aim of the pay transparency of achieving gender equality, I think it'll require that whole of society approach. And it's, I think, unrealistic to expect the pay transparency directive to achieve that ultimate aim.
To really address the gender pay gap, we need to look at the actual drivers of it, take a whole of society approach to addressing it and not leave it only at the door of employers in implementing the pay transparency directive.
OK, sounds like we might need another directive down the road. That's something to look forward to. OK, Nicola Harkin, thank you for joining us. Thanks a million, Ciarán. We're going to take a short break now. When we return, I'll be talking to Irish Times Washington correspondent Keith Duggan about the Federal Reserve's new chief, Kevin Warsh. Back in a few moments. Welcome back.
This is Inside Business with Ciarán Hancock. Kevin Warsh recently took over at the Federal Reserve for replacing Jerome Powell. He's been described by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as Donald Trump's sock puppet. So the question is, will he be his own man or a Trump patsy? Joining me on the line to answer that question is Keith Duggan, the Irish Times Washington correspondent.
I began by asking Keith to tell me a little bit about Warsh's background.
Well, yeah, Kevin Warsh is one of those sort of hitherto obscure, incredibly accomplished sort of financial people who sort of whose lives appear to be kind of run along a kind of, you know, like just a track of accomplishment. He's 56 years. He's from upstate New York. He went to Stanford and went to Harvard Law School.
While at Stanford, he met a businesswoman, Jane Lauder, who is the heiress to the Estee Lauder company. And he basically moved through private equity, investments, et cetera, until 2001 after the strikes in the World Trade Center. He kind of felt a calling or a need to get into public governance there.
And he has served on the Federal Reserve Board before and obviously most recently has come back into the spotlight because Donald Trump appoints him to succeed Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve.
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Chapter 6: What changes will employers need to make in job advertisements?
What are the chances that his relationship with Warsh might go the same way?
Yeah, I think, I mean, when he appointed Powell, I'm not sure he gave all that much thought to it. And I think he assumed that Powell would be more malleable than he proved to be. I mean, through a sort of an onslaught of Trump pressures on various institutions and institutions, People, Jerome Powell really, really stood.
He was unyielding in the pressure he faced for the past sort of couple of years. Warsh is far more closely aligned, Donald Trump, but because of, you know, economic realities here at the moment, particularly with the pandemic. with climate inflation and, you know, fuel prices caused by Donald Trump's war with Iran. It remains to be seen if he's going to be able to lower interest rates this year.
The general feeling is that he won't. And it might be 2027 before that occurs.
What's the mood like over there at the moment, Keith, among people? You know, we talk a lot here about cost of living pressures and it gets a lot of airtime, etc. What's it like over there?
Definitely, I think there is an increasing sense that the cost of living is becoming unmanageable for many, many people. It's, you know, it's strange, like the United States has become a really horrendously expensive country to survive in. to get buy-in for many, many people.
And I think there's a lot of disillusionment amongst people who were persuaded to vote for Donald Trump because of that message in November 2024. So that's sort of the political mood. I mean, the day-to-day mood on the street is still much as it always was. People are getting on with things and making the best of things.
But, yeah, certainly it's a strange time and you hear it and read it all the time about the fuel prices in petrol stations. That's really a sort of, you know, an inescapable indictment for the administration at the moment because people see it every single day and they're reminded of the fact that this is not what they wanted or voted for.
And of course, there are midterm elections coming up later in the year, aren't there? And Trump's poll ratings are pretty poor at the moment.
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