Mediation effect.

The pronounced pay gap prevalent in companies has raised critical concerns regarding organizational equity. This study investigates mechanisms to mitigate pay gap through the lens of management compliance attention, with the dual objectives of enhancing intra-firm distributive justice and fostering sustainable organizational development. Furthermore, this study employs a comprehensive methodology, including textual analysis of annual reports to construct management compliance attention variables and the Chinese Huazheng ESG rating system to measure social performance. The results show that:(1) Management compliance attention is negatively correlated with pay gap(β = -0.010,p