Gender pay gap reporting has been mandatory for large employers since 2017. Eight reporting cycles later, most organisations still publish a gap, an explanation and an action plan. What almost none of them hold, even internally, is any record of what individual vacancies did about it.

That is not an accident. Reporting was designed to measure outcomes. But the gap does not form on payday. It forms earlier, in which roles women see, which roles they apply for, and how senior roles are distributed before a salary is negotiated. Your reporting counts who you employ. It has never once counted who saw the role.

This is why so many action plans read the same and move so little. They operate at the level of policy, mentoring and culture, all downstream of a simpler question: when you advertised your last senior post, what did you do to put it in front of women, and can you show it? Not describe it. Show it. A dated record, tied to the vacancy, that a remuneration committee could inspect. Some employers generate that record through dedicated channels such as Women's Equality, one documented attraction step per role. Others do it through their own outreach. The point is the paper, not the pathway.

Pay gap reporting taught employers one true thing: what gets measured gets attention. The lesson has simply not been applied one step earlier, where the numbers are made.