“Corporate policies promoting pay equality reflect an organisation’s culture and help organisations to bridge diversity gaps, attract talent and drive long-term competitiveness. Organisations with racial and other discrimination imbalances, expose themselves to reputational and potential legal risk.” – JSE Sustainability Disclosure Guidance 2022
The importance of pay equity is increasingly recognised as both a workforce and governance issue. The gender pay gap remains one of the most persistent manifestations of labour market inequality worldwide. Drawing on evidence from more than 180 countries, the World Inequality Report 2026 finds that women receive only 28.2% of global labour income despite decades of progress in educational attainment and workforce participation, and earn approximately 61% of men’s hourly earnings from paid employment.
These findings demonstrate that gender inequality extends well beyond equal pay for equal work, reflecting structural disparities in employment, occupational segregation and career progression.
As human capital assumes greater strategic importance, governments, regulators and investors increasingly recognise workforce equity as a key determinant of organisational performance and long-term value creation. In the context of technological disruption, demographic change and evolving workforce expectations, the World Economic Forum argues that organisations able to draw from the full pool of available talent are better positioned to innovate and compete. Consequently, workforce issues such as remuneration, diversity and inclusion have become core governance considerations.
Within this context, the gender pay gap has emerged as a key indicator of workforce equity and organisational effectiveness. Unlike equal pay for work of equal value, which assesses whether employees performing substantially similar work receive equal remuneration, the gender pay gap measures the overall difference in average earnings between women and men across an organisation, reflecting the cumulative effects of occupational segregation, unequal career progression and women’s underrepresentation in senior leadership. As such, organisations may comply with equal pay legislation while still exhibiting significant gender pay gaps.
Gender pay gap reporting therefore provides an important measure of organisational outcomes and equips boards, investors and other stakeholders with information to assess human capital management, remuneration governance and long-term organisational sustainability.
South Africa reflects these global patterns in particularly acute ways, given its status as one of the world’s most unequal societies. Drawing on comprehensive administrative tax data from the South African Revenue Service (SARS) covering the formal economy, a SA-TIED working paper found that women earned approximately 89 cents for every rand earned by men in 2008, declining to 78 cents by 2021. The study further found that the gender pay gap persists across the income distribution, is particularly pronounced among lower-income workers, and remains evident in high-skilled occupations, where women continue to be underrepresented in senior and higher-paying roles.
These labour market outcomes are reflected in South Africa’s broader gender equality profile. Although the country performs comparatively well on educational attainment and political empowerment, the World Economic Forum’s Closing the Gender Gap in Senior Leadership identifies Economic Participation and Opportunity as its weakest dimension, reflecting persistent disparities in labour force participation, earned income, wage equality and representation in senior leadership. Despite recent advances in remuneration transparency, public reporting of gender pay gaps remains absent from South Africa’s corporate disclosure framework. While designated employers submit confidential Income Differential Statements (EEA4) under section 27 of the Employment Equity Act, these data are not publicly disclosed. At the same time, sections 30A and 30B of the Companies Amendment Act now require public disclosure of vertical wage inequality, but not gender pay gaps.
This contrasts with international practice, where gender pay gap disclosure is recognised as an essential component of corporate accountability. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) identifies gender pay transparency as an increasingly expected governance practice that enables organisations, investors and employees to identify, monitor and address structural pay disparities through comparable public disclosure. Similarly, the International Labour Organization (ILO) identifies gender pay transparency, alongside objective job evaluation, collective bargaining and measures addressing occupational segregation and unpaid care work, as a cornerstone of effective strategies to reduce gender pay gaps.
These evolving expectations are also evident in South Africa’s capital markets. The JSE’s voluntary Sustainability Disclosure Guidance 2022 recommends that listed companies disclose the ratio of the total annual remuneration of women to men, and by race group, for each employee category and significant location of operation, as part of broader human capital reporting.
Against this backdrop, Just Share’s 2025 JSE Top 40 Gender Pay Gap Disclosure Practices briefing established the first baseline assessment of gender pay gap reporting among South Africa’s largest listed companies, revealing that disclosure was limited, inconsistent and largely incomparable. Building on that baseline, this report examines how disclosure practices have evolved over the past year and evaluates the quality, completeness and comparability of gender pay gap reporting among JSE Top 40 companies.
