​​Shelley’s employer, a health-care tech firm, came to her with a spreadsheet of pay scales a few years after she started working at the company. The company wanted to implement pay ranges as it grew, and asked for her feedback. When Shelley saw the spreadsheet, she realized she wasn’t making even the minimum amount her employer had suggested.

“I’m not even in the band,” she told her employer. The company lowered the pay scale rather than give her a raise. 

Still, she stayed for nine years, climbing the company ranks to become a product director. “They offered me a lot in terms of professional development,” says Shelley, who asked to use just her first name to protect her future job prospects.

But in 2021, another company, a Vancouver-based life sciences startup, made her an offer she couldn’t refuse: a 50 per cent salary increase. She left, and says her decision was largely “financially motivated.” 

Canada’s public- and private-sector employers are undergoing a major shift toward greater salary transparency. Canada implemented the Pay Equity Act in 2021, requiring federally regulated employers to develop a pay equity strategy, regularly conduct pay equity assessments and re-examine pay practices with a focus on closing the gender pay gap—which nearly tripled in Canada’s tech sector between 2016 to 2021, according to a 2024 Toronto Metropolitan University study. Ontario, Quebec and B.C.—the provinces with the highest concentration of tech workers—have adopted pay transparency regulations. 

But people in tech jobs told The Logic that the industry still suffers from a culture of pay secrecy and loopholes in rules that contribute to pay inequity. 

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Much of Canada’s pay transparency progress has come in the last three years. B.C., where 4.3 per cent of the population works in tech, passed the Pay Transparency Act last year. Earlier this year, Ontario, where almost half of the country’s tech workers reside, adopted new pay transparency rules that will require employers to disclose salary ranges in job listings, among other measures.

Such rules hold employers accountable and help workers understand “am I being paid fairly amongst my peers within my company and consistent to what my labour would be worth on the open market,” says Marissa McNeelands, founder of Toronto-based women’s tech collective Toast. 

The new regulations have produced results. Job search website Indeed reported that less than half of the B.C. job postings on its site in the third quarter of 2023 featured pay information. Pay transparency legislation passed in November, and postings with salary information jumped to 76 per cent by February 2024. The numbers are trending up nationwide as well. In October 2024, 48 per cent of all Canadian job postings on Indeed included some form of pay information, compared to 23 per cent in October 2019, Brendon Bernard, Indeed’s senior economist, told The Logic. The share of job listings in Canada’s tech sector that included pay details jumped to 30 per cent from 10 per cent during the same period. 

Yet workers say listed pay scales are often too wide to be meaningful. “It’s often vague,” says a Toronto-based full-stack developer who has worked in tech for six years. The developer, who asked that his name not be used to avoid hurting his career prospects, told The Logic that listed salaries could range from $80,000 to $160,000.

Tech workers who spoke to The Logic said their employers implicitly or explicitly discourage open discussion of compensation. But conversations with colleagues and online resources like Levels.fyi—a tech-focused salary information website—made some realize that they were undercompensated.

The full-stack developer recently accepted a new job at a Canadian software firm that pays 25 per cent less than his previous one “after months of applying and getting ghosted.” After speaking with a colleague at his new workplace, he discovered that he was “way underpaid” for the same role.

A recent university graduate (who also asked that she not be named over fear of reprisals) accepted an internship last year at a major Canadian marketing agency that paid $18-20 per hour. Her manager quickly piled on technical job duties that weren’t listed in the description, like front-end web development work for the likes of RBC and Labatt.

The other interns working in marketing and graphic design told her they were being paid up to 67 per cent more. Her manager told her it was in her “own self-interest” not to ask for a raise. “They told me there was no room for negotiation. I felt extremely defeated.”

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Hiren Joshi, the technology solutions director for recruiting agency Robert Half, noted that over half of the hiring managers that his company surveyed said including salary information in job postings helped them save time and attract good candidates. 

Intel and IBM conduct pay equity assessments in the countries where they operate, the firms told The Logic. IBM representative Lorraine Baldwin says it provides “comprehensive compensation education” that lets employees view pay information through internal systems and managers. 

Microsoft this year expanded its pay equity and median pay analysis to include women across its global workforce. “We have made progress in narrowing the gaps” in pay globally, Microsoft Canada spokesperson Veronica Langvee told The Logic.

Borrowell, a Toronto-based fintech firm that employs over 100 people, is also preparing for Ontario’s new pay transparency rules. It’s reviewed pay bands for every role against market data to make sure staff salaries fall within those bands, but managers get more access to pay band information than their reports. All employees can access an internal system that explains how their salary is calculated, and are “encouraged to speak to their manager or HR to understand the inputs that go into the compensation,” says Eva Wong, Borrowell’s COO. 

Wong defended wider pay ranges, though, saying they “accommodate the different levels that could exist within a job” and “people’s different experiences” to let employees be considered for raises even without a promotion. 

Toronto-based password manager 1Password shares “full salary ranges for all jobs in Canada and the U.S.” Katya Laviolette, the firm’s chief people officer, told The Logic. Those ranges differ for each country but are the same across Canada, which can help address the significant pay discrepancies between cities. Laviolette says the pay bands never vary by more than 35 per cent between the minimum and maximum.

Tech employees told The Logic that better pay transparency makes a big difference—and that they’re pursuing companies that offer it. After leaving the marketing agency, the university graduate landed an internship with a data centre firm in Toronto. She says the company, which employs tens of thousands of people worldwide, felt “obviously different” because all of the interns received the same salary and relocation bonus. “That gave me some peace to know that,” she says. 

Correction: 1Password’s salary ranges are different for the U.S. and Canada, but the same across Canadian provinces. This story has been updated.