My Struggle With the Last Great Taboo: Admitting My Salary

Using the hashtag #talkpay, people are tweeting about how much money they make—a radical thing to do in a culture that treats disclosing your salary as the ultimate taboo.
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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?

Emily’s Many Dumb Years of Salary Idiocy

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.

I worked my way up the ladder and eventually became a senior editor in charge of a small team. When I was given the promotion, the company offered me $35,000 less than the man who had held the title before me. $35,000. Less. I knew this because he was my friend and he’d disclosed his wage to me. When I objected, they said it was because he had negotiated his starting salary from the get go; because I hadn’t I was locked in to certain restrictions about how much of a raise a current employee can get. When I again objected they said he had “priced himself out of a job” and had left himself with “nowhere to go in the company.” They thought I still had some growing to do.

I grew right out of the company.

Standing Up for My Worth

I did not make that mistake again. When I started at WIRED, I negotiated fiercely. I was 30. I had been a manager for a few years, and this was the first time I was finally doing what I was supposed to do all along.

The person I most have to thank for that awakening is the man at my old job who told me what he made so that when I was elevated to his role I understood the gap between my offer and his former salary. Without that knowledge, I would never have known I was being suckered. And here I must also acknowledge how incredibly pissed off I was at him when I found out how much he made. And then again how pissed off I was at everyone I worked with when I was offered so much less.

Did the knowledge hurt my relationships with my coworkers? Yes. Of course it did. I felt cheated. I felt undervalued. I frankly felt I was the victim of a double standard. And I felt irrationally angry at my friend, my male coworker, even though he was not the person undervaluing me. But issues of trust and self worth and value and wealth are complicated, and his bravery in telling me his salary got filtered through a bevy of raw emotions.

Still, I am eternally grateful.

The other person who taught me to stand up for my value as an employee was my best friend. She talked nonstop about her salary negotiations throughout our 20s, which, let me tell you, did not always make for titillating chatter over cocktails. By the time we hit 30 she was making so much more money than me it was nauseating, but she’d started her career exactly as I had, working her way up from intern to manager, learning on the job (we’d both attended the same liberal arts university where practical skills were not the focus), and switching jobs every few years. We were both in creative fields. The difference was she had the guts to advocate for herself every single time anyone told her what she was worth. She would stop and say, actually, here are the reasons I am worth more.

And she’s right.

Every time I have an annual review or a meeting about expanding my role at work, I aim to be her. I think of my friend and it gives me strength.

Can I Put My Money Where My Mouth Is?

So that leaves me here, today, sitting at my desk, typing and retyping a tweet about what I earn. I know that the transparency will be beneficial. I know that the reporters and editors at my own company could all advocate for ourselves better if we all knew what the other was making.

And yet. I hesitate. It’s a game of chicken. It’s most useful if we all do it. I want us to close our eyes and tweet in unison. All of WIRED. All of Conde Nast. All of the media. All of everyone.

But I’m scared to be out there alone. The hundreds of people tweeting their salaries have my undying admiration, but they are not my coworkers. They are mostly not even in my field. And now that I’ve gotten to a leadership position at a job I truly love, I’m a hypocrite. I don’t want to piss anyone off. I’m part of the problem. I’m torn.

And that is stupid. ‘Cause I know this silence is stupid. This aversion to speaking about money is not just harmful in the way it perpetuates inequality by keeping from workers the very basic data we need to negotiate with our employers on our own behalf. It’s also just plain stupid because it asks us to pretend that money is some kind of afterthought. That it is not, in fact, the whole point of employment. Of course it is! I hate the whole Silicon Valley disingenuousness around money---"I’m a billionaire, but I'm really in it to change the world. What's that? You can't make rent?" That’s how this taboo is used to exploit workers up and down the chain. Hopefully we also derive meaning and satisfaction from our work, but we’re kidding ourselves if we pretend that work does not exist primarily to put money in our pockets in order for us to live lives. To support our families. And therefore, salary information should be considered the most vital, the most important aspect of a job.

By sharing that basic data, we empower everyone. And yet when I look deep into my heart and ask why I haven’t yet just typed my current salary here I must admit that it’s because the powers of taboo are strong in me, too. I think back to that man in my old job; I think of my current colleagues. One tweet could change the way we all feel about each other. And that's what's so terrifying about it.