More Transparency, To A Point

By Ben Comer, Chief Editor, Life Science Leader

This month’s cover story features Martin Mackay, a former R&D leader at Pfizer, Astra- Zeneca, and Alexion, and now the CEO of Rallybio, a rare disease startup he cofounded in 2018 with two former colleagues. Leaving Alexion to start a new company from scratch was a challenge Mackay embraced; based on his experience hiring and building teams, and his initial conversations with potential investors, Mackay was confident about those aspects of the endeavor, as well as the ability to find and develop important new medicines. It was the business side — both running the business day-to-day and constantly meeting with investors and potential investors — that gave him pause. Mackay has learned a lot in the five years since Rallybio launched, and the company is comfortably capitalized, with a current runway into the first quarter of 2025.

The CEO role has given Mackay broader responsibilities beyond fundraising — and more things to think about. He cares about his employees and their families and wants his workforce of just under 50 to be motivated and successful. In 2021, he joined the remuneration committee at Novo Nordisk, an advisory group that makes recommendations about employee compensation. Given the recent push by a growing number of U.S. states (eight states have enacted laws, and at least 15 more are considering laws) to make job salary ranges transparent to potential applicants, I asked Mackay about his position on salary transparency, now that he holds the keys to the Rallybio kingdom.

Providing salary ranges next to job postings (the key provision of the new state laws) is not the same thing as making individual employee salaries transparent, the way the National Health Service (NHS) did when Mackay worked there as a young man. “Everybody knew everybody’s salaries, because they were all displayed on notice boards,” says Mackay. “It was a completely open system.” Would Mackay follow the NHS and bring full salary transparency to Rallybio? He says his heart is with the transparency movement, particularly when it comes to demanding pay equity across gender and ethnic lines. With individual employees, he emphasizes the need for transparent discussions about why someone is being paid at a certain level, which can require courageous conversations. But making everyone’s salary known to everyone else may be a bridge too far.

The difficulty with posting every employee’s salary in a public forum, or even just within company walls, is that people would spend an inordinate amount of time trying to work through differences in pay. Questions would multiply as to “why Jenny, two seats away, earns more than I do, and we’re doing the exact same job … too much energy could get spent on that,” says Mackay. More transparency is needed to address pay disparities related to gender and ethnicity, for example, but when it comes to individual salary transparency, be careful, advises Mackay. Sunlight is the best of disinfectants, as the expression goes, but too much of it can burn.