Pay transparency causes women to compete with other women: When salaries are disclosed in a workplace, women often take for granted that they will be paid less than their male peers and instead focus on being paid equally with their women counterparts, the European Commission found in a study picked up by Bloomberg. The study comes as the EU is set to introduce a trailblazing legislation that aims to close the gender pay gap by taking steps such as requiring companies with at least 50 employees to disclose data on pay. However, the findings of the study could change the mechanism with which the legislation aims to change things as pay transparency may not be enough.

What to do instead? A more effective way to tackle the gender pay gap is to give women more feedback on their performance and increase their self-esteem so that they feel more encouraged to ask for raises and promotions, said co-author Ginevra Marandola, an economist at the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.

Other interesting findings: Men tend to put in less extra effort in an organization with more women bosses, while women work better under other women managers.

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This discovery of fossils could push back the timeline of life on our planet back by more than 300 mn years: Scientists might have discovered the oldest fossils on Earth in Canada, which date back at least 3.75 bn years and possibly even 4.2 bn years, writes Vice. The fossils were originally discovered in 2017 by Dominic Papineau, an associate professor at University College London. Since then, Papineau and his colleagues have been running tests on the fossils and the recent findings published in Science Advance show that the earliest known organisms are barely younger than Earth itself. They also suggest that there’s a diverse microbial ecosystem that could be existing on other planets as well. The findings “push back the clock for the origin of life and to search specifically for these kinds of things on other planets,” Papineau explained.

Just because you’re a criminal organization, doesn’t mean that you can’t create a strong corporate culture. Case in point: Conti — a ransomware group with 350 members who collectively have made some USD 2.7 bn in crypto in only two years. The cybercrime group provides monthly salaries for workers and conducts performance reviews and training sessions to help them grow within the organization, writes CNBC, citing leaked documents. Meanwhile, negotiators who help with ransoms receive commissions ranging from 0.5% to 1%. They also have an employee referral program where employees can receive bonuses for referring other talents — as well as an “employee of the month,” who is given a bonus equal to half their salary.

We know all of this because of a revenge plot within the organization: The FBI have managed to collect leaked documents from the Russian organization, getting more information about its size, leadership, business operations, and even the source code of its ransomware. This came after a Ukrainian individual in the organization began to leak information on Twitter in response to Conti supporting Russia’s actions during the war.