42. Pay Transparency for Allies

Welcome back to Spend Donate Invest. I know it’s not just me. There are a lot of things that keep me up at night. Climate change, anti-Blackness, the baby formula shortage. And what surprises me is that we usually talk about how we can vote, or even how we can protest. But I’m curious about the power of our money.

Every week I read a listener letter, do some research, talk to experts, sometimes I’ll read an entire book to be able to provide some thoughts. If you ever want to send in your question, please look for the email address in the show notes. I will never share your name, you have my word on that.

Here’s this week’s letter:
I’m wondering how I can be an ally at work. I heard that there’s a new pay transparency law coming into play, in the past what always made me uncomfortable was thinking about the nondisclosure form I had signed promising that I wouldn’t share my salary with anyone, but over the past few years as I’ve become educated about pay discrepancies particularly for women, I have started to think that what my employer is asking me to do is unethical. So my question is, do you recommend pay transparency as a form of allyship?

Uh yes! I can’t count the number of times that I wished I knew how much my peers were getting paid because I just had no idea if I was being fairly or not. It’s not easy to ask for this type of information when you are marginalized. I too was worried about the nondisclosure form I had signed, although the older I get, the less I care about it too. And actually in around 2014, my understanding is that President Obama increased employee protections on this topic. I’ll include a link to those changes.

But you know, I also had a vague sense of potential embarrassment. What if I found out I was getting paid less than my peers? What would I do with that revelation? And how would it feel for my peer to know that? On a purely rational level, it doesn’t make sense that I, a Black woman would feel shame about being taken advantage of, if it turned out my employer was underpaying me. But, I think about people who have been scammed in all areas of life- maybe they’ve been cheated on by a spouse, or they got screwed by a home contractor, even though we shouldn’t feel embarrassed about having been taken advantage of, especially when it has been well documented that women are paid less as a systematic problem. Even then I felt a hint of fear about being ashamed at what I might find out. And so, in most jobs I’ve had, I have not had the courage to ask my peers to share how much they were being paid.

To be clear, even when I have had the courage, I have not asked point blank, how much do you get paid? What I have asked is to say “I’m currently getting paid X Dollars to do this work that we both do. Obviously you don’t owe me anything, but I have always wondered if I’m getting paid the standard rate. Do you know what the standard rate is for the work we do?” And that was about the level of awkwardness that I was able to tolerate at that point in my life.

So if you’re an ally, you can do one better. You can approach your colleague and let them know, “you don’t have to respond to this, but I am aware that sometimes women, or specifically Latina women, or Black women, or Asian women are paid less than their male counterparts, so without any expectation that you will respond to this, I just want to say that they are paying me X Dollars to do this work that we both do. I am going to walk away now. If you ever want to follow up on this conversation, I am open to that. I hope you will forgive my awkwardness and take this in the spirit of allyship that I intended it, but of course, if you have feedback on that too, I’m open.” And then you can walk away and let your colleague process what you’ve shared or if they want to engage, you can play it by ear.

The idea isn’t to drop a bombshell on them. It’s to provide information that might be helpful to them. They might never address the topic with you again, that’s OK. Allyship isn’t about the thank you cards, right? And I guarantee you, after you do this once, you will walk away with some thoughts on what went well and what didn’t, for next time.

In different industries, allies are finding different ways to provide pay transparency. A group of authors have a google doc where writers can share what they were paid to write books. They can say their name if they want, or they can provide some high level demographic information. For example, they might indicate that they are a first time author who is publishing a Young Adult fiction book with a big 4 major publishing company.

I’ve heard of groups of executives sharing that information with each other as well. This would be like a group of school principals or marketing directors. The challenge there is that I’ve seen this type of transparency within groups of the same demographic. So for example, it might be a group of women who are Marketing Directors. Of course, there’s power in knowing what other women are getting paid to do the same work. But what would be much more helpful to know is what the men are being paid! I worked at a company once where two people who had the exact same job were paid different amounts depending on what their college degree was in. It was whispered about, but I never heard anyone speaking in specifics. I wish there had more pay transparency back in those days. For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that gen Z is not playing by the old rules and they are sharing that type of information with each other.

Before I drop off, I did want to address one thing you mentioned briefly in your letter. You talked about a new pay transparency law that’s coming into effect. My understanding is that the new pay transparency law requires companies to post minimum and maximum salary for an available role. So I guess that gets us closer to pay transparency. If you know that account managers at your job get paid between $80 and $100, and you know you are getting paid $80, that tells you something. But I just wanted to point out that what the new law is NOT doing is saying that we as employees have the ability to openly share our pay with our colleagues.

In the EU, they are working on proposing legislation now that would also publish the range of pay for a particular role, but would also protect employees who want to ask their companies the data behind their own gender wage gaps.

I’m going to link a wired article where they say

“An example of large-scale salary transparency is taking place in Iceland, where, as of 2018, companies with more than 25 employees have had to prove they pay equally for equal work and correct any pay equity gaps. If companies can show they pay equally, they receive certification, and those without will incur a daily fine. A similar scheme for companies with 10 or more employees was implemented in Canada at the end of 2021, with a view to correcting all pay equity gaps by September 2024.”

So hopefully this is our future, globally. Of all the issues we are facing as a world, taking back this one bit of power just seems like such low hanging fruit, I hope we do better as a society.

Write back and let me know how it goes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ruthgotian/2022/05/24/why-new-pay-transparency-law-may-not-solve-the-wage-discrimination-problem/?sh=6943467d489e
https://www.wired.com/story/salary-transparency-gender-pay-gap/
https://www.govdocs.com/can-employees-discuss-pay-salaries/

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