Visa Inc.'s promise to disclose additional information about what it pays employees has led a prominent activist investor to ditch a planned proxy fight.

Arjuna Capital withdrew a shareholder proposal that asked Visa to disclose quantitative data about what it pays employees and how jobs and compensation are distributed by race and gender. Arjuna said it was told by Visa that the payments giant will publish "quantitative statistically adjusted pay gaps" for its current fiscal year, and will later expand its reporting to include median pay gaps.

"Visa is joining an elite group of firms that are walking the talk on racial and gender pay equity," Natasha Lamb, managing partner at Arjuna Capital, said in a statement Wednesday. "The value of transparent and comprehensive pay-gap accounting cannot be overstated for companies looking to attract and retain diverse talent. Credit to Visa for stepping into leadership and doing the hard work."

Many companies offer an adjusted look at compensation that takes into account an employee's role and location. But Visa will join a small roster of financial firms that have agreed to release more blunt assessments of compensation practices. The difference matters as executives seek to close those gaps and improve the diversity of their ranks.

Women at Citigroup Inc., for instance, are paid on average more than 99% of what men are paid on an adjusted basis. That's little changed from 2018, when Citigroup first began releasing this data. But without the adjustments, the firm's median pay for women is 26% less than for men, an improvement from the 29% gap it first revealed in 2019.

Visa has said it hopes to improve the diversity of its workforce, and in 2020 set a goal to increase the number of executives from historically underrepresented groups at the vice-president level and higher by 50% in three years. The firm said last year it was making progress toward that goal.

In the past, the company has offered only a boilerplate assessment of its pay equity status, without providing supporting data.

"Equal pay for equal work," Visa said in a filing last year. "Men and women earn the same pay for the same work globally, and the same is true for underrepresented employees and their White peers in the U.S."

Jenny Surane reports for Bloomberg News.

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