I was 21 and they wanted to pay me $21,000 a year to be a full time staff writer. A thousand bucks for every year of life. That sounded decent. How much did life cost? Who knew. I hadn’t lived any yet. What did staff writers at a paper make? I had no idea. I signed on the dotted line without a hesitation.
Late last week, using the hashtag #talkpay, people began tweeting about how much money they make---a radical thing to do in a culture that treats disclosing your salary as the ultimate taboo. The movement was dreamed up by Lauren Voswinkel, a software designer, and was born out of the ongoing conversation about gender discrimination and inequality in the tech sector, and across the board in terms of pay in the US. How can we make sure men and women are paid equally for equal work? Well, one simple way to at least start is to make it clear what everyone makes. After all, we can’t know we are being paid less unless we know what everyone else is being paid. As Voswinkel told The Guardian, "This type of discrepancy is only allowed to exist in an environment where people are afraid to talk about this pay, and that’s the thing that I want to abolish." Salary transparency, and a culture in which workers feel comfortable sharing such basic information, is crucial to closing the gender wage gap.
And yet there are major forces at work protecting the trend of silence (beyond the always powerful inertia of maintaining the status quo), not the least of which is fear of retribution from current or future employers and of ruining relationships with current co-workers. The taboo is so entrenched that some people falsely believe it is illegal to disclose your salary to co-workers. It is not.
It took me years to learn to talk openly about my salary. And after embracing complete transparency, benefiting from brave coworkers who shared their earnings with me, and advocating for it myself, I still find myself hesitant to tweet what I make. Why?
After a year as a reporter, I got a new gig as an associate editor at an alt weekly. I forgot to ask the salary until I’d begun signing the contract. “Oh,” the HR person said in a whisper, “an associate editor makes….$30,000.” Fine. Sounds good. I was 22 and that was a $9,000 raise. I had no idea what my friends with jobs were making, no idea what the other people at this new newspaper were making. My boyfriend made $5,000 more than me but he was a scientist, so, apples to oranges.
I didn’t negotiate my next job’s salary because the job was so stupid that any pay seemed more than I deserved. I sat in a room and waited for my boss to have an idea he wanted to chat about. Mostly I looked for something better.
When I found it, I should have known what to do. I was 24 at this point, had friends around me I could have consulted for advice, but when a major media corporation called to offer me a job as a copy editor with a salary of $50,000 I nearly spat with joy. It sounded like so much money I said thank you and hung up.
It wasn’t until I was in that job for years that I realized other people had negotiated on that phone call. When I later became a manager at that company I learned that for most new positions they have many thousands of dollars more on hand for the role, in the expectation that the new hire will negotiate up. I could have gotten at least $5,000 more a year right off the bat just by ASKING. But I didn’t. I was grateful for work. I didn’t want to fuck it up.