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Academic research has added weight to the business case for HR investment, finding organisations are more productive when they offer work-life balance and reduce their gender pay gap.

The US-based research team, led by Professor Traci Sitzmann, say in their paper that while many HR professionals claim that gender equity increases organisational performance, academic scholarship "has not substantiated the business case".

Prior studies have offered "limited and conflated understanding of the effects of gender-based pay disparities", the researchers say. Some of these studies even suggested the pay gap might have "little or no effect on organisational performance" if employees are resigned to it.

The team set out to determine whether and when the organisation-level gender pay gap is related to labour productivity, defined as an organisation's output per employee...