I ran across a really interesting article in Pink Magazine the other day about the ongoing struggle for pay equity. In it, journalist Christina Boufis makes a case for salary transparency.
She leads the article with a fascinating anecdote. Apparently Gloria Steinem once told a room full of corporate execs that they should pick one woman in the room and make a pact to always be honest with one another about their salaries. Paula Henderson, one of the young women in the room, made just such a pact, and through twenty years of career changes and economic ups and downs, she estimates that having that transparency made she and her pact partner about three million dollars!
Now certainly many of us aren't working in the same kind of lucrative field that Henderson and her partner are, but it really made me think about my own relationship to money when it comes to friends and colleagues. I've always been pretty transparent, partly because of my feminist values, but also because I think I've always hungered for the camaraderie of others who struggle with the freelance lifestyle (it's all feast and famine). But now I think I'm going to be even more transparent.
I urge you to send this post to someone you'd like to create a transparency pact with and ask her if she's down for the long haul. Or, if you're feeling really brave, just make a pact with yourself that you'll tell any and all other women how much you make if it looks like it might help them leverage their own salary negotiations or just make them better informed.
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Wouldn't the point be to find a male colleague with whom to share salary info - so that you, as a woman, know that you're being paid a comparable salary to him, a man?
I think it's good to be open about this stuff, pact or no pact, women and men alike. I don't have a problem telling colleagues what I make if it seems relevant, but then awkward conversations are kind of my forte.
I agree that you should find an opposite sex partner for this arrangement. Also, I am a former elementary teacher, so who the heck ever heard of 'salary negotiations?' What are those? I would, as well as those who get paid by the hour, certainly like to know how this works. Huh.
A few years ago, at a dinner party with some colleagues, we went around the room and told each other, not even our present salary, but the salary we had been hired at. Some fascinating discrepancies (not sex-based, and, as near as we could tell, based on what our HR people had thought they could get away with), came to light, and the conversation really helped people in salary negotiations from there on out.
More recently, a friend and I were promoted to the same level, but her salary went up more than mine (again, not gender or sex based--we're both cis-gendered women). I asked about it, was told it was a mistake, and given the raise. What's more, i was told other people were given the raise, too, and thanked for identifying the mistake.
So, bottom line--salary transparency is good for everyone, whether the discrimination is sex-based or not.
I have no idea if this is par for the course in other industries - just a word of caution from a guy in the tech sector, but...
I'd point out that you want to be careful to read your employee handbook if you're interested in sharing salary information with a co-worker or colleague in the same industry. At every place I've worked at, and at every salary or contract-rate negotiation I've been in, it was made very clear that sharing the details of such negotiations (whether with coworkers or colleagues/'competitors') is grounds for immediate termination.
So, you know, be careful and all that. :-)
in my personal, not-for-profit world experience, sharing salary information is socially discouraged, but in no way against any rules. But I agree, check the rules--preferably before you're hired: if it's against the rules to share your salary, it's the firm's way of making sure they get away with paying you less and maybe you don't want to work there.
I once followed the same line of thought about transparency, and after a little subsequent googling, I found www.glassdoor.com
Obviously, it will get better with time and participation, so enter your info!
I heard a funny story the other day that I thought I would share. So, about 10 years ago when the Ontario government was setting up a pay equity commission, they hired four lawyers. Three were female lawyers, and one was a male lawyer. Let us remember that this was the PAY EQUITY commission, a organization that would be charged with ensuring equitable salaries in the government and corporate sector.
Well, all four of the lawyers were just out of law school with no distinguishing experience. A couple years into the job they discovered that the male lawyer was making $20,000 more than the female lawyers. When they approached HR at the PAY EQUITY commission... they were told the man was making more because... he asked for it.
While I believe in the importance of stressing salary negotiation for women, I want to stress how screwed up it is when the pay equity commission doesn't have pay equity. I mean really? What were those people thinking???
This is tough. Yes, men are more likely to ask for more money than women. But women who ask for more money are less likely to get it than men, and are more likely to be viewed negatively for asking than men.
Is this your personal experience, or is this data from the DOL or something? I'm not trying to challenge you or anything--I'm just curious and would want to look at the data if you know where it is.
Here in Norway, information about salary, fortune, and taxes paid are made public by the government. Socialist Left and the Socialdemocrats have decided that online newspapers should be allowed to publish this information on the Internet in searchable form. All we have to do is enter the name of a friend/colleague/boss, and we will know how much he/she owns, earns and pays in taxes.
It is quite amusing that those who complain over the high taxes here in Norway always turn out to be someone with a high salary and/or fortune. Yes, it must be terribly hard for them to be rich.
An old BBC article about this.
Oh I so agree, companies will always pay you as little as they think that they can get away with. What most people forget is that the employee/employer relationship is adversarial. You should always have your own best interests at heart because you can guarantee that they do.
It's true that companies sometimes pay people what they ask for, but it isn't as simple as "Women, start asking for more!"
We ask for what we ask for based on what we've made in the past and what our female friends have told us they've made and so forth. It's simply not always feasable, if you want/need a job, to go in there asking for $20k more than you think you can get. So we're all a bit limited by our experiences.
Just a general observation, not directed at any particular comment.
I think its important to point out, as Courtney alludes to in this post and as is alluded to in the article, that many organizations have pay transparency built into their structure. In my experience, those organizations tend to be more radical ideologically, with transparency being valued in all aspects of the workplace (esp. in areas of professional relations and interpersonal conflict).
I also think it is important to point out that while speaking of how much one earns is taboo in the U.S., it is not this way in other countries. Here in India people freely talk about how much money they make. I would be interested to know more about why these differences exist. Something to look into...