The issue of corporate social responsibility to employees has drawn increasing attention of scholars. Based on the upper echelons theory, social class theory and imprinting theory, from the perspective of corporate social responsibility to employees, by taking 46,818 observations of 5,205 listed companies 16 years data between 2007 and 2022, we test the impact of chairman of the board’s poverty experience on the fairness of corporate compensation, that is, on the internal and external pay gap. The main conclusions are as follows. Firms with poverty experience chairman pay more attention to the fairness of internal compensation and the level of employee compensation within the firm, thus reduce internal and chairman pay gap, and promote external pay gap (give its employee more pay than the industry average). Our findings remain robust after a series of robustness test. we study the issue of corporate social responsibility to employees from a unique perspective, which expands the research scope of upper echelons theory, social class theory and imprinting theory; at the same time, it provides some enlightenment for firm's talents selection and social responsibility commitment practice.