Here’s a piece of world-leading, ground-breaking legislation to pay attention to: the April 4 deadline for U.K. companies to file gender pay gap reports with the government.

In Canada, we flail and fret about the historic pay gap — more like a pay trench — that leaves women making 74 cents for every dollar earned by men as measured by annual earnings or 87 cents to every dollar on an hourly wage measure. And we collectively ask: what then must we do? Responses often come in the soft form of talking about the issue more, or encouraging co-workers to speak openly about what they earn. None of this has had much effect.

So let’s get corporate. In the U.K., the government swiftly moved from draft legislation to rules in force that compel companies with 250 or more employees to file annual reports answering a set list of questions:

Regulation 8: the difference between the mean hourly rate (that is, the average hourly rate) of pay of male full-pay relevant employees and that of female full-pay relevant employees.

Regulation 9: the difference between the median hourly rate of pay of male full-pay relevant employees and that of female full-pay relevant employees.

Regulation 10: the difference between the mean bonus pay paid to male relevant employees and that paid to female relevant employees.

Companies must also disclose the median bonus pay gap, the proportion of men and women who were paid bonuses and a breakdown of the proportion of male and female employees by quartile pay bands (employees in the lower, lower middle, upper middle and upper quartile pay bands).

Transparency is the foundation stone of the new legislation. All reports are posted on gov.uk. As of Friday, 3,625 companies had filed, or about a third of what has been estimated to be the full data set. Breaches of the regulations, which will be enforced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, include unlawful act notices, which will require employers to adopt an action plan to bring them into compliance, and potential fines and summary convictions.

I like this initiative. Take the U.K. arm of McKinsey &Co., the much-publicized consultancy with a worldwide reputation for retraining management and fixing corporate cultures. McKinsey’s research has gone deep into the topic of achieving economic growth through diversity. It’s a real women booster when it comes to the analyses it undertakes.

Last June it published “The Power of Parity: Advancing Women’s Equality in Canada.” Here’s a snippet: “Survey results clearly show that, in corporate Canada, women are less likely than men to be promoted to the next level at almost every stage of their careers. Promotion from director to vice president is a particular bottleneck, where men are three times more likely to advance than women. The loss of female talent along the pipeline is not due to lack of ambition or higher attrition — women aspire to promotions at a similar rate and actually leave at a lower rate than their male counterparts.”

So what is life like for women inside McKinsey? Well whaddya know, the mean hourly rate for McKinsey women is 24 per cent lower than that of McKinsey men; the median is 14 per cent lower. Women’s mean bonus pay is a stunning 76 per cent lower; the median — 53 per cent.

McKinsey’s explanation as to why this is so is unsurprising. The problem lies, the company says, in the disproportionate representation of men in senior roles. “We know we have a big challenge ahead of us to achieve gender parity in our senior leadership, but we are leading from the front in recruiting high-performing women,” the company states in its report. “Our gender-pay-gap numbers are a timely reminder that we still have some way to go.”

The company notes that more than 40 per cent of new consultants recruited are women. That leaves unresolved what barriers and biases remain entrenched and work against women rising to the level of senior partner. And leaves us to imagine years of partnership rewards extended to men trained up in the same warm waters of the same social and MBA environments.

The lack of women in senior roles emerges as a common theme through the filings — the Bank of England and HSBC to name just two.

I won’t use the famous sunlight-as-a-disinfectant quote again, but the impact of the compulsory disclosures is far reaching. Consider young men and women launching into the working world eager to see beyond a corporation’s homilies to how it actually operates, and how it distributes rewards. Consider a corporation’s existing employees who are fed serial modern diversity proclamations, only to find the company in question is stuck in the dark ages. Will senior women quit in protest?

(The January resignation of the BBC’s Carrie Gracie from her post as China editor is often cited as an example. Gracie remains with the BBC, in London, and stands front and centre in the ongoing public battle for pay fairness in the workplace. This week on BBC One’s Panorama, tennis star Martina Navratilova estimated that the pay she receives for her Wimbledon coverage, about £15,000, is one-tenth of what John McEnroe is paid for his broadcast work through the tournament. When asked if the difference could lie in McEnroe’s more frequent contributions, Navratilova responded, “Ten times as much? I don’t think so.”)

The compulsory U.K. filings do not expose specific like-for-like jobs that pay men and women differently for doing work of equal value. They provide broad overviews that unmask systemic problems and will, year over year, reveal whether inequities have been addressed, and to what degree. Companies are not compelled to provide any narrative accompaniment to the data, but all the pay gap reports I viewed did just that. There’s a great deal of language along the lines of “we must do better.” Now companies will measurably be held to that commitment, and no doubt will have to rethink how they access their talent pipelines and how they will modernize their recruitment practices.

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Canada? There’s the 30-per-cent initiative, backed by banks and big asset managers, to push for 30-per-cent representation of women on boards and in executive management positions by 2022. Research shows that women in power equates to a reduction in the wage gap. But inclusion in the 30-per-cent club is voluntary.

It’s time for mandatory measures. The U.K. model is a good start. If you find it too extreme, think of Iceland, which has set the year 2022 as the date by which the country wants to see the eradication of the gender pay gap. This year? On Jan. 1, the Icelandic government passed legislation making it a legal requirement that companies earn an audited “equal pay certificate” by the end of 2018. This may surprise you. After all, Iceland commonly ranks in first place in gender equality rankings. In a press release, the government expressed its dismay that being number one doesn’t mean parity: “Notwithstanding … undertakings by the Icelandic state under international conventions and numerous measures taken by the government to promote gender equality in the labour market, gender equality in terms of equal pay has yet to be achieved in Iceland.”

For all its vaunted feminist principles, the Canadian government has been sleepy on this. And it could have been a world beater.

jenwells@thestar.ca