something I learned while still pretty junior was that if you only ever talk to other underrepresented people about pay, you get an idea of normal numbers, but who you really need to be talking to are the white guys. their numbers are completely different
I am now very senior. It’s still true
I have been tremendously lucky in my career, but I have absolutely seen men get paid more for the same or less work with the same or fewer qualifications and I have seen men praised as geniuses for behavior that gets me called a bitch.
a white guy friend (who can read this, hi!) casually dropped “oh that job only pays $this, I’m sure you make more than that by now” and it was almost twice as much as I actually made
As someone that’s not in the US, when I hear some friends talking about salaries over there it always blows my mind what they say is a low. Sad thing is I know within my country I do have the same privilege by being a man and white-ish looking.
Yeah, this. We get paid a lot, but there’s also the Sword of Damocles that is US healthcare. And once you get knocked down, the lack of anything close to adequate safety net makes getting back up insanely difficult.
That being said, all of this is unrelated to the topic of wage disparity, which is so ridiculous. It’s why I’m for wage transparency and don’t mind sharing my pay with those who ask.
The number of times I have said to people in my current job that it was THE HIGHEST I have ever been paid and gotten just wildly blank shocked stares from the men in the room...
It's galling.
One of the jobs I was hired to (by women leadership) had to boost my pay b/c I was below minimum range!
I ended up quitting a job in IT (had a weird career path) that I had, after finding out that they had hired a 19 year old white guy, no degree or experience, at $10/hr more than me. I was in my mid 20s, had a B.S., had been with the company for 3 years, and was a team lead.
still cishet oldfat whiteguy checking in -
when I discovered that one of our women sr. engineers on last program was more experienced than and equally capable to another living in same area (San Diego) but underpaid by 20k compared to him, I threw a minor shitfit until we did a full salary review.
A *lot* of our senior people who'd been with the company >10 years, heck even >5y, got notable salary boosts because we'd been hiring new folks at higher salaries and annual raises weren't keeping up.
Unsurprisingly, 8 of the top 10 folks in % of salary boost were women or BIPOC.
Sad to confirm.
This is how small isolated decisions become a systemic problem. If it's harder for under-represented demographics to get a job then they'll spend longer in the jobs they have.
At pretty much every employer I know about the long tenured employees are most valuable and relatively the most under paid.
I remember talking to a co-worker (white guy) who did in the same role less but made $10 an hour more! I had more experience and was better qualified. I was floored.
My old employer managed to effectively eliminate the gender pay gap for role and level. Everyone's pay increase was determined by HR using an algorithm that was based off your review scores. It removed all discretion from the managers but wiped out the gap in a few cycles.
A friend had to leave her old job because her boss would deliberately write nasty reviews dinging her on made up infractions of non-existent policies right before annual reviews because HIS bosses got upset if anyone was outperforming the nepo hires.
I had one of those. He wasn't my mgr at review time but had been the prior year...when he hired a disaster of an intern and pushed her on me.
My new mgr and our dir were appalled/apologetic, then pushed HR to approve a midyear offering I greatly appreciated.
Guess which of us is still there?
Consistently making less than my coworkers probably should have been a sign I wasn't really a white dude.
My largest bumps in pay were to get me *just* over the salaries of those I would then manage.
I remember working at a firm, in a windowless corner, with 10 years experience and bilingual. They hired a dude who had never done that sort of work before, monolingual, gave him his own office and twice my pay. Then they offered me a “promotion” of running my own office alone…
..which required me getting a car because it was a 2-hr round trip commute, no bus. They needed me as the only bilingual staff to do the job. I asked for a raise. They fucking yelled at me for half an hour
So I told them I guess they didn’t need me. They caved but then fucked me out of my bonus
