My first brush withsalary inequality occurred in the veryfirst months of my very first full-time job as a reporter.
A fresh-faced journalism school graduate,I accepted an offerto workfora large media company based in New York City. The work wasexciting,but thepay was terrible. Still, in my naiveté I assumedallentry-level journalists were suffering similarly.
Several frustrating months of ramen noodles later, I started to wonder why some of mycolleagues seemed to be less hard-up. Initial queries about salary were met with awkwardness, if not downrightsuspicion. It would takea greatdeal of cajolingfor meto uncoverthe root of this awkwardness: a starkdiscrepancy amongteam members’ salaries.
When I confronted an aghastmanager with thisinformation, he admonished me for breaking protocol, pointing outthat “there was a time when such things weren’t discussed.”
That day was a wake-up call for me: When it comes to salaries, silence is anunscrupulous boss’s best friend.
AsCongress meets todebatethe merits ofgovernment interventionin the issue of equal pay,women and minorities need to realize they aren’t alone. And the best way to do that is to start talking about their paychecks. Bybreaking theoutdated workplace taboo that expects silence around salary, we can create a community of honesty and empowerment.
I’m just oneexample of how such a grassrootssystem can work—aftercreating arudimentary salary baseline with the help of friends and coworkers, I was able to nearly double my salary two years after that initial job interview.
Decadesfrom parity
April 14is Equal Pay Day, an annual event meant toraise awareness ofthe fact that women and men are still not paid the same in the US—and indeed may not reachparityforanother43 years.
Depending on how you crunch the numbers,women in the US earn somewhere between 23% and7% less than their male counterparts. Black and Latina women fare even worse, and the LGBT communitysuffers from similar disparities. It’s a scaffolded structureof inequality based on generations of patriarchal power dynamics held together withgender stereotypes.
And historical inequities aside, thereasons women still earn less in 2015 show why we’re sucha long way fromclosing the gap:because they are more likely to take time off to take care of family obligations; because they are more likely to work in lower-paying professions; because they are more likely to experience gender discrimination; because they are less preparedtonegotiate.
“Leaning in” is easier said than done
Linda Babco*ck has spent years researching workplace negotiation, and hasconcluded thatwomen “are socialized from an early age not to promote their own interests and to focus instead on the needs of others.” When women do negotiate, researchers have found them to be less effective, forced topay a literal price for attitudes that penalize womenperceived as pushy or aggressive.
Bucking this trend doesn’t necessarily feel good. I remember distinctlywhat it was like to beshamed by myboss for daring to “askfor more,” as nonprofit Levo callsits annual wage gap initiative.
Over at Reddit, interim CEO Ellen Pao thinks shehas a solution for gender-based wage discrimination.Defeated but clearly undeterredby losing in her recent gender discrimination lawsuit, Pao announced her intention toend all salary negotiations.
It’s a bold move, and Pao’s strategy may help the company’s weakest negotiators, but it won’t address the fatesof employeeswho have been “systematically underpaid.”
“One thing we see a lot is that pay is set in your last company,” Joelle Emerson, leader ofa strategy firm that works with tech companies to promote diversity, recently told Fast Company. “If you were being treated unfairly at your last company, that’s just going to follow you throughout your career.”
At the age of 27, I know I’m extremely lucky to have only needed two jobs to erase my initial (non)negotiation—for others, it could take many more years, even decades, to make up for wages lost, due often to circ*mstances outside of their control.
Six months after that fateful meeting with my manager, I accepted a new job. It came with a modest pay bump and a new title, and I was so grateful for the opportunity that I made the same mistake twice: I accepted the company’s assertion that myoffer was nonnegotiable.
Only now, I was savvier. I went looking for women in similar positions elsewhereandcompared notes; not only was I making less than some of my coworkers, Iwas making less than some of these outside peers, too. Thistime I went to my boss with the information to confidently appraise my own worth. I got the raise.
The frustrating flip-side to all of this is that women shouldn’t have to be the ones tasked with overcoming their own systemic oppression.Why should we, to paraphrase Sheryl Sandberg, always have to be “leaning in” so damn hard?
Over at New York Magazine, Ann Friedman rightly points out that “asking women to take responsibility for closing the pay gap with their ace negotiating skills is sort of like teaching women self-defense as a way of addressing sexual assault. It puts the burden on women to figure this out as individuals—it doesn’t ask much of employers, and it doesn’t really address thebigger issue.”
We shouldn’t have to goit alone
To this end, it makessense thatcollective and not individual action is the most effective strategy.Barring a miraculous societal shift, transparency could be key to alleviating some of the pressure.
In Germany,women’s affairs ministerManuela Schwesigis pushing for a law that would force companies to“publish salary structures,” according to The Guardian.The kind of transparencychampioned by Schwesig may be too still radicalfor the majority of American companies, but that doesn’t mean we’reout of options.
We—women and minorities, andmen too—need to get over theantiquated hang-ups about salary secrecyand be proactive. Ask your co-workers how much they make, and tell them how much you make. This isn’t about giving yourself a leg up, it’s about creating a whole new rung on the ladderto stand on, together. When it comes to the wage gap, a rising tide is a more equitable tide.
