Stefan Gaertner has been thinking about pay equity longer than most people have known it was a problem. He's a long-time friend, colleague, and one of the sharpest minds in the field - so when I get him on the show, we have a lot to talk about.

In this episode, we get into the uneven global landscape of pay equity legislation and what that patchwork means for multinational employers trying to build coherent compensation programs. We talk pay transparency - what it's actually changing inside organizations versus what companies say it's changing. From there, we dig into the mechanics: point-factor job evaluation, salary band design, and why the methodology underneath your pay decisions matters more than most HR leaders want to admit.

We also spend real time on flat organizational structures and what happens to pay equity when you strip out the career ladder - and whether that's a feature or a bug. Then we close on AI: what it can genuinely do to support pay equity analysis, where human judgment is still non-negotiable, and why handing compensation decisions to an algorithm is a different kind of equity problem.

Chapters

• 00:00 The State of Pay Equity
• 08:06 Pay Transparency's Real Impact on Business
• 23:06 Point-Based Job Evaluation Systems
• 34:47 Salary Bands and Pay Fairness
• 43:03 Flat Structures, Career Decisions, and Pay Equity
• 1:10:33 AI's Role in Pay Equity