Britain Just Legislated Salary Honesty. Pakistan Is Still Working Up the Nerve to Ask.

🇵🇰 Pakistan · 🇬🇧 United Kingdom

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

The United Kingdom has spent nine years legally forcing its largest employers to publish their own gender pay gaps, and this October a government consultation closed on requiring salary ranges in job adverts outright. None of it has made British workers any braver: 45.3 percent are too uncomfortable to ask their current employer for a raise, according to a CV-Library survey of 1,200 professionals. Pakistan has no such law, and candidates there are told, almost universally, to expect the first offer to be a lowball — and still, many skip the counteroffer anyway, for fear of looking ungrateful. Transparency and negotiation, it turns out, are two different muscles, and neither country has trained both.

Do's & Don'ts

🇵🇰 Pakistan

🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Pakistan

The dominant advice in Pakistan's own career guides is almost a cliché by now: always negotiate, because the employer expects you to and has priced the gap in. One longtime poster on an expat forum summed it up in six words: "always do bargain for salary in Pakistan," adding that employers "normally offer you a lower salary" on the assumption a counter is coming. What's striking is how little of that confidence survives contact with the actual number. Career site Taraki's guide to the local market names "cultural norms around discussing money" as the single biggest reason candidates skip negotiating altogether, with many early-career applicants worried that asking for more will look greedy after a long job search, or that the employer will simply withdraw the offer.

The result is a culture that's comfortable with the ritual of negotiation but deeply uncomfortable with the content of it. The accepted move when an interviewer asks for your expectations early is to deflect — ask for their budgeted range instead of naming your own number — and the tone throughout is meant to stay collaborative rather than transactional, opening with appreciation for the offer before ever mentioning a figure. Job portals have made market research easier than it used to be, but what a colleague at the next desk actually earns remains, by near-universal custom, nobody else's business. That norm is shifting faster at the entry level than anywhere else in the hierarchy: younger candidates increasingly cross-check an offer against ranges already listed on local job portals before they ever sit down with an interviewer, even if they'd never dream of asking the colleague next to them the same question out loud.

United Kingdom

Britain has gone the opposite direction on paper. Since 2017, any employer with 250 or more staff has had to publish its gender pay gap by law, and this past July the government opened a fresh consultation — which closed on 27 October, two days before this piece went to print — proposing to require salary ranges in job adverts too, modelled loosely on, but deliberately narrower than, the EU's own Pay Transparency Directive.

None of that legal scaffolding has translated into personal courage. The same CV-Library survey found 61.3 percent of British workers hadn't had a pay rise in twelve to eighteen months, and historical polling has put the share who've simply never raised the subject with their employer above half. The reluctance is sharply uneven by sector — more than half of workers in social care and hospitality say they never negotiate pay at all, against under 40 percent in engineering — and it compounds unevenly across the workforce itself: University of Essex research found Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers in the UK are more likely than any other ethnic group to be paid below the living wage, with the disadvantage landing hardest on men born abroad, which happens to describe a fair number of this article's own readers on arrival. Graduates fare somewhat better: UK-educated Pakistani and Bangladeshi men are paid roughly in line with white British men by the time they finish a degree locally, though women in the same position still trail their white British peers, a reminder that "educated here" closes some of the gap, but not all of it, and not evenly by gender.

The Reckoning

The irony is that each country has solved exactly the half of the problem the other one hasn't. The UK has built the legal infrastructure for transparency — pay gaps published, ranges increasingly expected in job ads — while its workers still flinch at using any of it to actually ask for more. Pakistan has built the opposite reflex: a near-universal expectation that you will negotiate, and that the number on offer is a floor, not a fact, while treating the number itself as something close to a state secret once it's agreed.

Put plainly: a confident-sounding Lahore negotiator and an anxious London one may be achieving nearly the same outcome by entirely different routes — one by expecting to ask and refusing to disclose, the other by disclosing (eventually, by law) and rarely asking. On Hofstede's cultural-dimensions framework, Pakistan scores high on uncertainty avoidance and low on individualism, consistent with pay staying a private, relationship-managed matter; the UK scores near the opposite end on both, which is exactly why its fix for wage secrecy was legislation rather than etiquette. Neither approach has actually produced a confident, well-paid, forthcoming worker yet, just two different stalled projects, one running on law and one running on custom, both still waiting on the individual to actually open their mouth.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind (teamblind.com) — A product manager who'd just accepted a new role, with a base and vesting stock on top, asked coworkers what they were making to check if the offer was fair. Nobody would give a number; one colleague told them pay talk "can make things awkward," and another admitted discussing it with coworkers directly had backfired for them before — a reminder that pay secrecy isn't a Pakistan-specific habit so much as an office-culture default most companies never bothered to unlearn.

Expat.com forum, Pakistan — A longtime poster answering a newcomer's question about job interviews put the local negotiating logic in one line: "always do bargain for salary in Pakistan as the employers normally offer you a lower salary" — delivered as settled, uncontroversial advice rather than a tip.

ExpatExchange forum, UK — One expat relocating for a UK role wrote that their family received no housing allowance in the initial offer, but ended up with more than originally proposed after collecting quotes from three relocation companies and using them as leverage — their closing advice to future movers was blunt: "ONLY go UP and never go DOWN" once a number is on the table.

Stylist.co.uk, citing a 2,000-person workplace poll — Career coach Corinne Mills' advice to the chronically underpaid and afraid was less about courage than preparation: "Before you ask, really think through your case very carefully" — useful counsel given the same poll found a third of respondents knew colleagues in the same job earning more, and most had never said a word about it.

Conclusion

If you're moving from Pakistan to the UK, use the leverage the law now hands you — ask for the range before you commit real time to a process, and treat every company's published pay-gap report as the opening fact in your own negotiation, not background noise to skip past. If you're moving the other way, drop the instinct to accept the first number; Pakistani employers price in a counteroffer whether or not you make one, so declining to negotiate is simply leaving money on a table that was already set for you.

Either way, the actual skill being tested isn't honesty, it's timing — knowing whether your new office wants the ask made early and politely, or made rarely and compensated for by legislation instead. Everyone, it turns out, is uncomfortable talking about money. They've just each picked a different stage of the hiring process to be uncomfortable at.