From today’s New York Times:
There are many questions Alison Green is asked as a columnist who writes about workplace issues. There was the woman who wanted to know if she should attend couple’s therapy with her boss and the boss’s boyfriend. (The boyfriend happened to be her father.) Another time she heard complaints about a janitor who cast a hex on her colleagues.
But Ms. Green was taken aback recently when asked about her salary, a topic so fraught even she couldn’t come up with a good answer. “No one has ever asked me that,” she said. “I don’t want to say.”
Many employees are loath to discuss their salaries, she said, worried it would cause resentment, or worse, among peers. “We are all so weird about telling people how much money we make, even me.”
Perhaps it is why, too, Ms. Green recently asked readers of her “Ask A Manager” website to share their job title, where they live and how much they make each year. Answers were anonymous; the data was compiled in a spreadsheet on Ms. Green’s website so people could sort through the data.
Within a half-hour, she had 1,000 responses. A day later, so many people posted their salaries her website froze. So far, three weeks later, she has more than 26,000 responses, everything from an accountant in Chicago who makes $90,000 to a librarian in Austin who earns $39,000. She was surprised by the overwhelming response: Previous surveys in 2014 and 2017 garnered a fraction of interest, fewer than 2,700 comments apiece.
Why the interest now? Attitudes about workers disclosing pay are shifting, for one, as unemployment has reached a five-decade low. And the gig economy has made salary comparing a near necessity for many. (How else does a person know what to charge if they are a freelancer?)
Read the complete article here.