Power of Culture Blog
Equity Progress Report (Sept-Nov ’24)
A regular update on our equity work
Bethann Steiner, Senior Director of Public Affairs
In September 2020 Mass Cultural Council announced an update to Hire.Culture.org — our statewide creative employment site which last year alone got more than 1.2M page views — that salary information would be required in postings for Full-Time, Part-Time, Seasonal, and Consultant positions.
While this was implemented prior to the Council’s adoption of our first Racial Equity Plan, this forward-thinking policy was consistent with the Agency’s commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and updated our heavily-used digital service to the benefit of creative job seekers, providing them with improved transparency on the compensation for job opportunities they were seeking.
We received a few questions early on from long-time HireCulture.org users about how to post new opportunities correctly, but have seen no evidence of decreased usage of the site since implementing salary requirements.
Last week, our partners in the Healey-Driscoll Administration’s Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development published a blog outlining the benefits of wage transparency, inspired by new state law the Governor signed this summer. The Commonwealth’s wage transparency law is aimed at promoting equity in the workplace. It takes effect next year, in October 2025, and requires employers to share pay ranges in job postings and protects the rights of job applicants and employees to request the pay range for a position. These provisions apply to all Massachusetts employers with 25 or more employees.
While certainly implementing a policy change for an employment web site is easier than crafting and passing state legislation, Mass Cultural Council acknowledges with pride that we have four years of leading by example in this space, and is proud of the positive impacts HireCulture.org delivers to creative employment seekers in Massachusetts.
