A conversation with Legal Momentum Senior Attorney for Economic Empowerment, Seher Khawaja, was featured in Episode 3 of Quartz’s Work Reconsidered podcast, "Pay transparency: A double-edged sword"

Francesca Donner: I think that’s right. And it also helps to reduce bias. I had a really interesting conversation with Seher Khawaja, a senior attorney for economic empowerment from Legal Momentum. She said that pay transparency dramatically reduces unconscious bias or overt bias in salary setting. And here’s some of the ways that it can do that, and this is as it relates to gender. Employers might automatically think, Oh, she isn’t as reliable. Maybe she has children, maybe there’s actually an extension of the childcare penalty. What age is she? How likely is she to become pregnant? How many children does she have?’ Of course, these are questions that can’t explicitly be asked. But the fact is, the judgments are being made. And those judgments do result in women being paid less.