Governmental efforts to reduce the gender pay gap have resulted in a plethora of pay transparency laws. The effectiveness of such laws is subject to a vigorous scholarly debate and has prompted several policy evaluations. Despite the efforts to assess whether individual pay transparency laws are effective in reducing the gender pay gap, surprisingly little attention has been paid to which kind of pay transparency laws are effective in reducing the gender pay gap. Our article leverages both a systematic review of European and U.S. pay transparency laws and a systematic review of empirical studies evaluating the effectiveness of pay transparency laws to meta-analytically extrapolate which configurational aspects, which we call law design features, of pay transparency laws render them effective. Our article seeks to emphasize how choices of law design features can influence the effectiveness of pay transparency laws in reducing the gender pay gap. We aim to provide policy makers with a better-informed basis for designing potent pay transparency laws.
