Let’s Talk About Money

AMY BERNSTEIN: Salaries are, have always been the yardstick. You know, in, on my God, in Pride and Prejudice, it’s right there. You know, Mr. Darcy, he gets 400 a year, or whatever it was. And you learn this from the moment, you know, you hatch, that this is the way the world looks at things. I remember finding out that someone was making, a guy was making way more than I, and feeling embarrassed, because I thought we were equals. But when the yardstick came out, and I was a couple of inches short, that really hurt.

AMY GALLO: And yet…I think it’s still important we have that information.

NICOLE TORRES: You’re listening to Women at Work, from Harvard Business Review. I’m Nicole Torres.

AMY GALLO: I’m Amy Gallo.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And I’m Amy Bernstein. Talking with colleagues about what we earn can get us useful information. Having numbers from people in our office and in our field helps us figure out if we’re being paid fairly. It can help us see where our career’s heading and if we need to change course. So then why not be more open about our salary?

NICOLE TORRES: Well, one reason is that talking about salary, sharing that number can be really stressful. And learning that you’re making less or more than a peer is, at best, awkward, and at worst devastating. And apart from managing these emotions, there are a lot of practical questions, too, like, who should we tell? And when? And how? Plus, how do you deal with any unfairness that you might discover?

AMY GALLO: This episode we’re working through the complexities of salary disclosure: how we feel about it, ways we can ask, what are you making? And what to do with that sensitive information once you’ve got it. Nicole talks with an economist who’s been documenting people’s determination to keep their salaries to themselves, including how much they’d pay to stop that information from getting out to colleagues. I talk with the host of the Bad With Money podcast, who’s seen a lot of good come from conversations that feel bad at first. And Amy B. talks with an HR executive who has no problem with employees comparing notes on what they’re making. She’s done it herself, in fact.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And then we come back together and discuss how their insights and advice square with our experiences and what the main takeaways are.

NICOLE TORRES: First up, my conversation with Zoe Cullen. Zoe is a professor at Harvard Business School. She’s interested in pay transparency, the gender wage gap, and the fact that we have jobs to make something that many of us believe is too sensitive to talk about: money.

ZOE CULLEN: As an economist, it seems quite weird that we wouldn’t know the prices involved in all these things, but I think personally, and especially after doing this research, it’s not surprising at all, given how impactful the information is once revealed.

NICOLE TORRES: This research Zoe’s done with her colleague, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, happened at a large commercial bank in Asia. What they observed there in an experiment with several hundred of the bank’s employees showed them just how taboo sharing salaries can be, and the potential consequences of breaking that taboo. First, they needed to find out what these employees knew—or what they thought they knew—about their colleagues’ salaries. So they asked them to play a game: Guess the average salary of a group of five of your peers. You have their names right in front of you. Win a cash prize for getting close to the actual average.

ZOE CULLEN: We found that workers were on average overconfident in how much information they had. So about 60% of them thought that they were able to guess that average within about 5%. And in fact, about half of that number is the reality. So about a third of people were able to guess within 5%, and this is even when we introduced fancy prizes for correct guesses. They were incentivized to tell us the truth.

NICOLE TORRES: Did you see any gender effects? Like, I’m wondering, are women more sensitive about that stuff?

ZOE CULLEN: So yeah, so women are less confident in the information that they have, as in they’re less likely to say that they know about the average salaries of their peers, conditioned on what they actually do know, than their male counterparts.

NICOLE TORRES: What is the consequence of that?

ZOE CULLEN: Right, so I think when deciding whether or not renegotiate salary or to approach an employer and ask for a raise, one question in the back of one’s mind might be, how accurate is the information that I have? And that could very well affect how likely they are to bring the information up in that negotiation or to very decide to approach the employer in the first place. So much less confident in their information, but on average, very similarly informed. And so you know, in essence they were able to, when they made guesses about what others were earning, take information they had about their own salary—that may be a better signal about what women were earning—and adjust for the share of men in that group to get estimates that were as accurate as what men were guessing. Likewise, men would have to essentially understand that women were earning less. It just seemed that there was already sort of an intuitive sense of what the gaps were.

NICOLE TORRES: Some employees wanted more than an intuitive sense of what others at the bank were making. They wanted numbers. And they were willing to pay for them.

ZOE CULLEN: Well, so we offered people to buy information about salaries. So, and we could see who was interested in finding out this information. And about half of people were uninterested in purchasing this information, or they would pay a very small amount of money. And for the other half of the population that we studied, their willingness to pay for salary information was very high, on average two weeks’ worth of their salary. And you know, there’s not many things that would predict who is uninterested and how is interested. But one thing that does seem to be quite predictive is whether that person is up for a promotion, up for a raise, and so you can see that there’s sort of like this, there is this important function that salary information plays in your own take home pay, and outside of that, perhaps people are not that interested.

NICOLE TORRES: Got it; that makes sense. So, can you tell us specifically about your research into the benefits of pay transparency? So if someone finds out how much their, the person they sit next to makes, like what generally happens?

ZOE CULLEN: So there’s some evidence to suggest that when you first learn about how your salary compares to the average of your peers, that you respond in a negative way if you find out you’re earning less than you anticipated in relative terms, and a positive reaction if you find out that you’re making more than you would, than you anticipated. And the negative reaction can be captured in a couple of ways. It certainly was apparent in the number of hours people chose to work and the number of emails that they would send.

NICOLE TORRES: OK, so if you find out you’re making less than the coworker that sits next to you, that like will have a, like a real impact on your performance at work. What happens when you find out what your boss makes relative to what you make?

ZOE CULLEN: So in fact, learning what your boss makes, people typically underestimate what their boss earns, and so finding out that information is most often positive news in the sense that you find out that in fact your boss earns more than what you were anticipating, and we see that that’s quite motivating. In fact, across the board, people were motivated to come into work longer to sell more and to work harder when finding out that their boss earned more than they expected.

NICOLE TORRES: So back to Zoe and Ricardo’s experiment at the bank. They also measured how much people cared about their peers’ learning what they themselves were making. They sent each employee an email. It included that person’s name, salary, and seniority. And it said that they were considering sending that email with all this information to the five peers whose average salary they had guessed earlier in the game.

ZOE CULLEN: And in, then we asked, you know, will you be willing to send this email? Would you like us to send this email. And the vast majority of people would not like us to send that email. Only about 20% wanted us to. And among the ones that didn’t want us to send an email, 40% were willing to pay us over three days’ worth of salary to just keep us from sending that email. So, there was a really strong willingness to pay to prevent that information from being disclosed, and that was in the context of the game where it was coming from us researchers. So it sort of removed already some of the social friction around introducing sensitive information to a peer.

NICOLE TORRES: And did you get a sense of why, why that reluctance to let that information get out there?

ZOE CULLEN: Yeah, so well, you can ask this question of like, what were the patterns in who was willing to reveal, who was not willing to reveal? And also what relationship they had to the person who would be on the receiving end. And we did see that even when the recipient had spent more time working together with the person who might reveal, it didn’t affect how willing they were to open up. And at the same time, as they rose in relative perceived status, they still were no more likely to reveal their salary information. Typically, if you think your social status is high relative to others, you might be less inclined to keep that information secret. It would reflect that you’re at the top of your distribution. So, it does seem like a sort of an entrenched norm that sort of isn’t explained by traditional status concerns.

NICOLE TORRES: From here out, Zoe and I touched on a few other aspects of sharing salary information. Starting with, what sort of benefits, or what kind of fallout, should we expect once we do it?

ZOE CULLEN: Yeah, so it’s a complex question, because it requires understanding what you believe to be true about the recipient of that information, and also what you imagine you’re going to receive back. And so, in the typical situation, given what I know about how uninformed people are about what others are earning, I do think they’d have a hard time guessing whether or not their information would be information that made the person feel better or worse, or whether or not that information would be useful or not useful in their negotiation. I think there’s quite a lot of apprehension, and rightfully so, about what the impact of that information might be, because we do see that it matters what people’s relative earnings are.

NICOLE TORRES: OK, so it really, it sounds like it’s just really context dependent, you know, whether my sharing how much I make with Amanda, our producer, will lead to, whether that will benefit either one of us. Like, it really depends on what the situation is, what our relative earnings are, like what our motivations for getting that information are. Is that right?

ZOE CULLEN: Yeah, well, maybe I’ll just highlight a specific tension. Right? So imagine that the most valuable information for helping your peer renegotiate for higher pay is information about your earning more than your particular peer. And in conversation, of course, this isn’t anonymous information. You guys probably think of each other as a reference person. And you’ve had a relationship. And so when you reveal your higher pay with, like, the best intentions, we also know that that could have this demoralizing effect, even if it has a corresponding information benefit. So there’s something that we could think about doing, which is difficult in the context you described, but could be instituted more broadly, which is sort of, how do you reveal this information without making it personal, without having your personal identity associated with that information so that your peer receives the information, but it doesn’t trigger the social concerns associated with it?

NICOLE TORRES: I see, so it’s like better to discover, you know, what my peers are making, if they’re making a lot more than me, like in kind of an abstract, anonymous form. Like online I see what the salary pay gaps are, and I suddenly know where I fit in the pay gap. Versus a coworker being like, oh, I make this much. And it’s like, you know, whatever, 20% more than you are making, because that could be super demoralizing for me, even though I have that information.

ZOE CULLEN: Yeah, so maybe you said the answer in that question, which is, maybe the best thing to do would be to put that information on Glassdoor or on PayScale.

NICOLE TORRES: Interesting. I’d love to know what you think about some of these recent laws that have been passed, like the one in Massachusetts, that prohibit employers from asking job applicants about what they’ve made previously. What do we know about how these laws are working?

ZOE CULLEN: Right, so actually a colleague of mine, Laura Adler, has interviewed HR professionals and asked them, now that the law’s in place, how do you go about soliciting information about what a person earns? And from conversations with her, my understanding is, an employer will typically say, now what have you made, but what do you expect to make? And so, I think with that in mind, the way an employee might respond, or what an economist would expect an employee to respond, is essentially to think about choosing the highest salary possible, conditional on still being accepted for that job. And it’s about credibly communicating that that’s the salary that you would accept, and you, you know, if the employer were to come back with a much lower offer then you would, you, the employee would walk away. And so I think that’s the way that we expect the bargaining process to go, and if so, one prediction is that for the employees who think that their past earnings are higher than average, maybe much higher than average, it can always go ahead and reveal that information. And it’s sort of a way of saying to the employer, in a credible way, these are my outside options. And so, the employer will know that if somebody chooses not to reveal their information, probably they’re on the lower end of the spectrum.

NICOLE TORRES: But do you think that asking, what do you expect to make, versus what you did make, do you think that will help in the aim of this law?

ZOE CULLEN: Yeah, I think it very well could. I mean, the idea behind this is that women who have stepped out of the labor market for some period, their most recent salary might be lower than an equally prepared male, and so the idea is sort of, to keep this from being persistent, if they have enough information, if the female candidate who has had a lower past salary has enough information to know that they shouldn’t just ask for the typical 10% higher over their past salaries, and in fact corrects for what they should be earning, had they not stepped out of the labor market at that time, then in fact it could be, it could be that the salaries they ask for are more similar than the salaries men ask for. I mean, there’s, we have to keep in mind, though, that all of the things the employer can see, the employer sees the gender of the employee, and can always make inferences based on this. So, I think the verdict is still out yet on how this is going to play out.

NICOLE TORRES: OK. So, I’m also curious how the research you’ve done on salary disclosure has affected the way you approach this in your own life.

ZOE CULLEN: Like, I get a lot of information, so I think people have, for the last three years now, disclosed to me any kind of salary secret that they have on account of reading papers that I’ve written, and I’ve also been asked the question of what I’m earning probably more often than the average person. I certainly disclose to my mentees and essentially the people who are considering the path towards academics, in part because I think they probably were in a position like me where they didn’t realize you could have a lucrative job in academia. So, it’s very context specific. I just, you know, I certainly had no information about what professors were paid at the time I chose to go into grad school. Like, you know, many people have to make a decision about business schools or economics departments, all these types of decisions that are really sort of like almost ad hoc decisions at the very end of their training. And I think salary information can be persuasive on the margins. So, I do share that information.

NICOLE TORRES: OK. Zoe, thank you so much for taking some time and chatting with me today.

ZOE CULLEN: Oh, thank you. It’s a been a pleasure.

AMY GALLO: I’m not surprised that this is an uncomfortable topic. That’s part of what motivated us to do this episode in the first place is, this is just such a sensitive issue for so many people. But I was surprised to hear Zoe talk about the results of her research around what people would be willing to pay to keep their salaries secret. And you know, for me, it’s so much about the discomfort of having to have the conversation. It’s less about the numbers. Our next guest really has no concern about sharing those numbers. She actually talks quite openly about how much she’s made for different work. And she’s, you know, really built her current career around the idea that we should talk about money more openly. Gaby Dunn is a comedian, journalist, host of the Bad With Money podcast, and the author of the Bad With Money book. Gaby, thank you so much for joining us.

GABY DUNN: Yeah, thank you for having me.

AMY GALLO: So, I want to get right to numbers. You have said publicly, on your show, in your book, that your salary at BuzzFeed was $55K, and that you made $150,000, you had a $150,000 advance on the book. How did it feel at first to have those numbers out in the world?

GABY DUNN: The BuzzFeed job I was at for about eight months in 2014, I think, 2014 into 2015. So that was my salary during that time. And then I ended up selling the Bad With Money book two years later, so 2017, after I had left BuzzFeed and been freelance for a while. So I think like it was interesting to have the BuzzFeed stuff, because I think there, there were people that were being paid very, very differently. I remember there was a night where all of us were a little drunk, and we started saying our salaries, and it like blew up, because we, you know, certain people that we thought of as huge and big assets to the company were actually making less, versus like also people that had the same exact job that I did, and literally sat next to me, and we had the same job title, were making less than me, or people that we didn’t, we also had the same job, they were making like, one guy was making like $25,000 more than me. So it was like really strange, and we couldn’t figure out what the metric was. And it ended up just like, it was great to have those numbers out there, because I think it helped people be like, you know, yeah, what is the metric? And also to negotiate and be like, wait a minute, but I know that this person makes this amount of money.

You know, I think with the book deal, I had the misconception of like, well, I’m going to get all that money at once. And like that is not the case. So it took me a year to actually write the book, and then you know, agents take some, publicists take some, managers take some. And so like whatever idea I had of that money, I knew it was great, but it would end up kind of coming out to like a decent yearly salary, rather than when you hear that number all at once, you’re like, oh my God, that person like had a windfall and got rich overnight. So the main thing that I didn’t love about having the book deal number out there was that it became like a lightning rod of misconception for people who don’t, who make a weekly salary and don’t understand that freelancing is like a dump of money, and then you might not get paid again for another 12 months. And you’re like, OK, how do I make this last? How do I budget? How do I really be mindful and careful about this number to make sure that this lasts, because I may not get another check until I turn this book in. But the only way that we can have any sort of information with which to negotiate, with which to, you know, help people out of poverty, with which to see like what people are making for their work or whatever, like the only way we can do that is with exact numbers. But hardly anyone speaks in exact numbers, because I think it causes such an emotional reaction in other people.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. I’m curious, I want to go back to the BuzzFeed conversation where people started disclosing, drunkenly disclosing their salaries. You said the conversation blew up, and I’m curious, were there like tears? Were people yelling at each other? Like, what do you mean when you say it blew up?

GABY DUNN: No, nobody was crying. Everyone was just kind of, yeah, it got rowdy in the pizza restaurant. Everyone was just kind of yelling, because we were shocked by what certain people were making, and we were, and like everyone kind of started like boosting, like people were like, no, you deserve more. Like, everyone started like, all of a sudden becoming hype men for each other, where we were like, you’ve got to go in there, and you’ve got to ask for what I had. You’ve got to do this. And like, what? You do this thing and this thing and this thing. You’ve got to ask for more money. And like, everyone just kind of started being like, that’s crazy. That’s too low. And like all these things that I think maybe everyone had in the back of their mind, but then to have like a bunch of your friends be like, wait a minute. Which was very kind. It ended up being very kind. On my end, there was a guy who I felt didn’t do a lot, and then he was making more money than me. I didn’t confront him directly about it during this conversation, but in my mind, I became angry, and I brought it up in a meeting later, because I was like, it’s not his fault. It’s someone else’s fault. And like, what is this?

AMY GALLO: Right. So is that something, have you told other friends of yours, or people who’ve come to you for advice, to have those sorts of conversations?

GABY DUNN: Oh, I think you should. I think you absolutely should. Your management doesn’t want you to. The bosses don’t want you to.

AMY GALLO: And have to, I do think, part of pay transparency, I think it was actually Rachel Sherman who, I saw her quoted in an article, as saying that taboo around money is very convenient for employers. Right?

GABY DUNN: Yes.

AMY GALLO: And I think, right?

GABY DUNN: Yes, absolutely. They want you to be ashamed.

AMY GALLO: And there’s something really powerful in being willing and able to talk about it. Something about, you know, we almost transfer the power to ourselves, as opposed to, you know, employers and HR folks who I think lots of them have our best interests at heart, but as we see from lots of research, that is not being actualized for many people.

GABY DUNN: No, no, they’re not, the company is not your friend. [LAUGHTER] At all. That’s a thing Ashley Ford says a lot, and I love. The company is not my friend. And they don’t have to, no, they are benefiting from your shame, absolutely. I would absolutely say, I would absolutely say to disclose your salary to your coworkers, to talk about salary, to talk about what you’re doing in terms of negotiating, to be like, here’s how many hours I’m putting in, and here’s what I’m getting. You know, are you staying after? Are you, like how many videos, for example, at BuzzFeed, how many videos did you turn in this month? OK, that’s interesting. That’s like two more than I turned in, and yet, you’re getting paid less. Why is that? Or like, even going in as a group, like if there’s a group of you who are like, all women, or all black people, or all, you know, Asian people, or whatever, and you’re noticing a trend, like go in there and be like, hey, all of us together have this question. Like, I think there’s this misconception that like workplaces are a family, and they’re not. Like, it’s not like, oh, we’re a family. We shouldn’t like rock the boat. It’s like, no, no, you’re getting paid to be there. So, you should absolutely like be open about what, like just make sure you’re getting the most amount that you can, and make sure that you like have other people backing you up. And you know, I think it’s like, you have to figure out who your actual allies are.

AMY GALLO: Right. I actually have this theory, actually, from listening to your podcast, because the, I think it’s the conversation about the specific number itself that’s really uncomfortable. And you have that friend who said he wanted to just like post his W2 on his door.

GABY DUNN: Oh, yeah, my colleague Andrew T that I used to work with at Comedy Central.

AMY GALLO: Yeah, and I just feel like, when I think about having to say the number out loud of what I make, it makes me really uncomfortable. But when I think about other people having that information, it makes me less uncomfortable. And I wonder how much of it is the actual interaction, where you have to watch someone’s reaction, whether they’re shocked or upset for you. Like, how much is it the actual dynamic between you two, versus the number?

GABY DUNN: Yeah, I mean, I think nobody wants to be pitied, and nobody wants to, you know, nobody wants to, I mean, I felt very ignorant. Like when I, when that guy was like, oh, this is what I’m making, and it was so much more than me, I was shocked, because I felt, like I felt like, oh, I should have known better. I should have known to go in with a higher number. I should have known, you know, to ask for more. I can’t believe I didn’t even think about this. I can’t believe I was so complacent. Like, it really lights a fire under you, because you’re embarrassed, because you, if you’re making a lot more than someone, then you, I felt guilty, because I was like, well, what, oh my God, like you do exactly what I do. Like, what the hell? But if I was making way less than someone, I would be like, oh my God, I’m a bad negotiator. I’m bad at business. I can’t believe it. I just was like, la, la, la, walking around the office. It was this thing of like, oh my God, I’m walking around the office doing this work, and someone here, in management and HR, knows that this person’s making more than me, and I look like a dummy.

AMY GALLO: Right, right, like a chump.

GABY DUNN: Like a chump, yeah. Nobody wants to look like a chump. So that’s like what’s hard about the actual numbers. We put our self-worth in it.

AMY GALLO: Yeah, and we heard from Zoe Cullen, who’s an economist, who’s researched this, and she said, she’s documented that there are costs to learning that your peers make more than you, some of which you just articulated. But I’m curious, are you still glad you had that information, even though it made you feel silly or stupid?

GABY DUNN: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. Because I didn’t stay there very long. And I think like I had no concept for a long time about what good salary was. I just didn’t know. And so also it manifested in this thing where you are like, well, I have a good salary, or what, at least what I think a good salary is in my mind, but yet I’m not able to pay these bills. I’m not able to do this. I’m not able to do that. Is this because I’m a bad person? Is this a me failure? Rather, so like a lot of stuff with my podcast, and with the Bad With Money book, is the realization that things that I thought were me failures, oh, wow, I’m bad, I’m a bad person, I’m bad with money, I’m ignorant, whatever all this is, later I ended up like have, because of the specifics, and because of having all the information, I was like, oh, no, no, no. This is other people that are screwing everyone over. This is a result of like either structural injustice or corporate greed or all this other stuff that I could have gone the rest of my life being like, I’m just not good enough. When in actual reality, it had nothing to do with me being good enough. It had to do with, like, unfair pay structures.

AMY GALLO: I actually have a friend who does a lot of paid speaking, and she was at this conference once where she had what she thought was an intense negotiation with the organizers. She was getting paid, and I can’t even remember the amount, let’s say $10,000 for the talk, and then she was sitting in the back of the room with the organizer while a man was speaking, and the organizer said, oh my gosh, you won’t believe that we had to pay him. And it was like, $30,000. And she was like, oh my gosh, I’m on the same stage, giving the same-length talk, and she just said it was awful. And she said, she sat there the whole time going, I can’t believe I let myself get paid this little. Whereas she had been really happy with the $10,000. You know?

GABY DUNN: Right.

AMY GALLO: And so, it was really demoralizing, but then she also had to wonder, is this about gender? You know, is this about my race? Like, she had to, she really had to wonder all of that. But ultimately she said, she ended up raising her rates as a result. So you know, I think those negative emotions, as awful as they feel, can end up with really positive outcomes, like you’ve discussed.

GABY DUNN: And talk to other people that are like you, because I think it’s maybe like a leap, and like a leap of faith to do, but there was a girl, I was speaking at a festival, and this girl was also speaking, like literally on the same lineup as me, like right before me. And she messaged me, we knew each other a little bit, but we had never met in person, but you know, on Twitter, and she messaged me and was like, hey, I see you’re on the lineup; what are they paying you? And I was like, oh, they’re paying me this amount. And she was like, OK, well, that’s like more than what I’m making. And I said, oh, go back to them. Say, Gaby Dunn told me that she’s making this amount. Why am I not making this amount? Like I was like, use my name. Feel free. And she was like, OK. So she went and did that, and then they raised her rate.

AMY GALLO: That’s awesome.

GABY DUNN: Yeah, and I was like, in my mind I was like, you know what? If she does that, and then they come to me, and they’re like, hey, you shouldn’t have done that, like you shouldn’t, we’re going to cancel your speech or whatever it is, I was like prepared. I was like, OK, I’m prepared for them to do, like if that’s the case, then like, whatever. You know, I’ll walk, I was OK with walking away from the amount of money, because I was like, and also, I would have probably put them on blast, because that’s what I do. But like, you know, I was like, oh, girl, she was like, I’m going to just say that somebody told me. And I was like, no. Use, say, Gaby Dunn. Link them to my page. Like, I don’t care.

AMY GALLO: Right. Well, Gaby, thank you so much for talking to us. This was great.

GABY DUNN: Yeah, thank you for having me.

NICOLE TORRES: HR keeps coming up in these conversations that we’re having about salary disclosure. Zoe and I talked about how in some places in the US, HR’s shifting from asking people what they made in their previous job, to what they expect to make in the job that they’re applying for. And you know, what the consequences of that might be for women. Now her research is turning to how HR comes up with the salaries it offers employees.

AMY GALLO: Yeah, and Gaby talked about how, and she says the company is not your friend. And she, you know, basically implies that HR doesn’t want us to be having that, these conversations.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So because HR keeps coming up, we thought we’d talk to someone who actually works in HR. Amelia Ransom is an HR leader, first at Nordstrom, and now at tax software company, Avalara. Her official title there is senior director of engagement and diversity.

AMY GALLLO: And she seems like someone who’s quite progressive for an HR person, especially around these issues, someone who wants us to be having these conversations, not you know, standing in our way of it.

NICOLE TORRES: Yeah, she seems chill.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, listen for yourself. Here’s our conversation. OK, Amelia, thanks so much for joining us to talk about this.

AMELIA RANSOM: Thanks for having me.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So talk about the first time you talked to a colleague what you were making, and tell us about that conversation and what came of it.

AMELIA RANSOM: Yeah, I remember it distinctly. I was a store manager, and we were having a conversation because I had gotten a refund from my 401(k). And I didn’t understand why. And I asked a colleague if she had gotten a refund, and she said, no. And I said, oh, that’s weird. So, I went to HR and figured out that there’s this test that they call the antidiscrimination test, which has nothing to do with race or gender. But it’s a test for 401(k) plans, because essentially they don’t want 401(k) plans to be shelters for rich people. They want them to be retirement savings plans for everyday people. And when you don’t pass that test, meaning you don’t have enough lower-wage earners, I’m using air quotes you can’t see, they punish you in a way by telling the high-wage earners that they can’t save as much as they thought they could save, and you have to have that taxable income, to incentivize companies to get everybody in the plan. Right? So, I got a refund, because I had just met the threshold. And the mark at that time, and I’m not sure if it’s the same marker, was $100,000 identified you from a government standpoint as a high wage earner. Well, my friend and colleague didn’t get a refund, because she wasn’t at a $100,000. And so that is what sparked the conversation around salary. Now, she wasn’t very far off me. I think she was making $98,000, and I was making like 102 or 103 or something like that. So we weren’t far off. But it sparked that first conversation about pay, and we sort of unwittingly got ourselves there. Right? We didn’t really intend to talk about pay, but I have to say, it wasn’t uncomfortable. We both were transparent with one another, both shared. We felt like there was equity in the band. I had been doing my job a little bit longer than she’d been doing her job. And it felt, I don’t think either of us came away feeling like, huh, I’m not being paid enough, or you know, what’s off here? But it was that first conversation I had about it, and I’m thankful that it went as well as it did.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, you were lucky, because I can imagine many ways that it would have gone off the rails quickly.

AMELIA RANSOM: Oh, absolutely. And this was someone that’s still a friend of mine, that I still, you know, there was a lot of trust in our relationship at the time, and there still is now. But I imagine if I’d had that conversation with someone that I didn’t have that trust established with, and if there had been more of a pay disparity, I mean, all the ways that you can imagine, right, that that would have gone differently.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, so who in your life knows what you earn now?

AMELIA RANSOM: There are actually a lot of people that know what I earn now. All of the people that I mentor know what I make. My significant other knows what I make. I don’t have children, but my nieces know what I make. And I have other family members that know. Well, I have one other family member that I can think of off the top of my head that knows what I make. But I will tell you that that sense of why I shared it with my nieces was because, so my niece posted a picture on Instagram that said, something like she wants to be the first millionaire in her family. And I was like, what? The second. Like, I don’t know what you think I’m out here doing. Like, and I literally texted her, and I said, I’m sorry, and I screen captured, you know, what she’d posted. And I said, the second. And she texted me back laughing. And I called her, and I said, I’m not having this conversation with you to brag, which I think she knew, but you need to know what, like what I earn, how I got there, what I do, how I save my money, what I’m investing in, things like that. I said, and I, it’s clear to me I need to be more transparent with you. Because you think that you’re going to be the first millionaire in this family, and I am tell you, you are woefully mistaken, ma’am.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Mm hm. It’s really interesting, because it used to be that, well, I think it still is, that your compensation was sort of the yardstick by which you were measured, sort of out there in the world. And you’re turning it into a teaching tool and a coaching tool. That’s a real change.

AMELIA RANSOM: Because I think it is, and I think particularly for women, you know, I live at the intersection of black and female, and I think in both of those realms and spaces, it’s important that we teach wealth, that we understand that our worth is not just in the money that we’re making, but how we can use that to make other people, other communities better as a result of it. And in part, I can do that through wealth accumulation.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And transparency.

AMELIA RANSOM: Absolutely.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, you are a public advocate for equal pay for women.

AMELIA RANSOM: Yes.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Walk us through how this kind of transparency fits into your advocacy and how you think about this. It’s not just the way you share, but the way people share with one another. Is that a way of furthering the cause?

AMELIA RANSOM: I think so. I think demystifying money is a way to build more equity between genders. So, I want to demystify it. I want to take the shame off of money. I want to take the mystique out of it. And I want women in particular, women of color very specifically, to use it as a tool for betterment.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So if you’re sharing the information, you know, let’s say I’m sharing with some of my colleagues, and it turns out that I earn more, substantially more, you know, I would worry about putting a damper on their enthusiasm for their work and their engagement, that it, you know, it wouldn’t just be awkward, it would be demotivating. Is that, what do you think of that?

AMELIA RANSOM: I think that’s a possibility, but I think when you have information, you have to remember that that’s all you have is information, and not a narrative. And so how do I use that information to create the right narrative? So, if you and I are colleagues, Amy, and you make $20,000 more than I do, that is all I know. And so I need to be careful not to create a narrative that may or may not be true. And so, if I were to have questions about that, if we’re colleagues, and I have questions about that for my manager, or for HR, or for my CEO, whoever that might be, I would start my questions about myself. What’s my pay band? How am I performing? What’s the range? What, like I have a lot of questions about me before I get to the point of, Amy makes more money than me. I might use that information to spark me to have a conversation, but my conversation isn’t about judge me against you. Judge me against what I should be getting based on my value and my outputs in my role today.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, you know, you are an HR leader. Does it make you even a little bit nervous, the idea that people are sharing salary information?

AMELIA RANSOM: The thing that makes me nervous, if anything at all, is that people tend to have, place values on different things in a hiring and negotiating their salary and their pay. Example: when I took this last role, I really highly value my time away. And so I asked for more vacation time. I didn’t ask for more pay in my negotiation. A colleague, a peer, may really value their pay more, their money more, than they value their time away, and may have asked for more pay. So, it would not make me uncomfortable to know that I have a peer who makes more money than I do. Because I got the thing that makes, that means more to me. And so why am I saying that? Because when we share that out of context, if I’m sitting with my peer, and she shares her salary, and I share mine, and she’s making more than me, without the context of understanding what happened in that negotiation, I then could use that, again, my theme is, information is information, not a narrative, I then form a whole narrative around that that maybe my manager likes her better because she’s, fill in the blank, whatever it is. When really, I have placed a value on something that means more to me.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, have you ever found yourself in a situation where an employee has clearly anchored her salary request in information she got from another employee? Have you ever been there, and how does that affect the way you approach the negotiation?

AMELIA RANSOM: Yes. The challenge in the particular situation that I’m thinking is that the employee that came to me didn’t actually have accurate information but believed the employee that had told her how much they were making. And I happened to know that that was not how much that employee was making.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, what did you do?

AMELIA RANSOM: So, you know, I have to keep that other person’s pay confidential. The conversation that I had was to be really transparent with her about the band, about where she was in the band, about her performance, about what the next steps were. Like I had to keep that conversation completely focused on her. And what I could say was, everyone on this team is within this band. Everyone that you work with is within this band. Which was a true statement. But I could not say, the person that you were talking to actually didn’t tell you the truth.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, God. [LAUGHTER]

AMELIA RANSOM: But what I had going for me in that conversation was, as a leader, I believe I had earned the trust of the people that worked for me. And that I would not lie. But I also would not share something that was confidential about her with anyone else. So I think it probably was not the most fulfilling conversation for that employee in that if she believed what she had heard, but where we got to in that conversation was about trust and trust between the two of us, that I was being honest with her, everyone was in the pay band. She was well-situated within the pay band. We continued to move her through the pay band and continued to set her up for her own promotion, or to do the thing that she wanted to do next. And so we had to have that level of trust, though. If we hadn’t had that, if for whatever reason that employee had not trusted me, I think that would have gone a completely different way.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Let me ask you what you say to women whom you mentor when they find out about a pay disparity. How do you coach them?

AMELIA RANSOM: The first thing I tell them is to do nothing. Right? Go to whatever your vice is. A pint of Haagen-Dazs for me, a glass of wine for somebody else. Like, don’t make up a narrative. Start getting the information, and start knowing why you want it, and what you’re going to do with it. Go, you know, if you have trust with other peers, go to them. If you have trust with, you know, a mentor, another mentor inside your organization, or someone that can help you get the information you need, go to them, get the information. Go to external sites. Get the information that you need. Make compelling case for yourself. And see where that lands. And then make choices based on that. If it’s not the company for you, if they won’t be transparent about your pay band, if you don’t feel like you’re getting the accurate information, if you feel like you’re getting pit against other employees, or they’re upset with you because you’ve had this conversation, the problem there is not you, if that’s the case. The problem is them.

AMY BERNSTEIN: How do you get that information, though? You know, you’re very, you really believe in equipping yourself with as much information as possible before forming your perspective, and then, you know, marching forth with it. But what about the more sensitive conversations that you might have, with a mentor or with a colleague? I mean, it’s a weird question to ask if it’s not part of the conversation normally.

AMELIA RANSOM: If you have a mentor, and you’re not talking about pay, I don’t know what you guys are talking about. I don’t know how to have a conversation about, with the people that I mentor and not, I’m talking about mentee, with my mentees, comprehensively. And your pay is one of those things, a component of what makes you up. So we are having that conversation.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, I think you’re a pretty extraordinary mentor. I mean—

AMELIA RANSOM: I don’t know that that’s true, Amy. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s a part of a normal conversation.

AMY BERNSTEIN: But what if it’s not? What if it’s not? What if I go to my mentor, and we have been too polite to discuss compensation? How do I bring it up?

AMELIA RANSOM: Get unpolite. This is your life you’re talking about. I don’t even know how to say that nicer. Like, get unpolite. The point of mentorship is not politeness. The point is growth and development.

AMY BERNSTEIN: What about with colleagues, with peers? How do you have the conversation with people with whom you probably never discuss salary?

AMELIA RANSOM: Yeah, I would say, that requires trust. If you don’t have a trusted relationship with your peers in that way, and maybe you don’t with all of them, and you do with some, then have the conversation with the some. Don’t expect, and I have not had this happen to me, but I can’t imagine someone that I know only in a tertiary way, only from sitting across this person in meetings, or meeting at the water cooler, asking me how much money I make. Like, I don’t even know how to describe to you the look on my face you’re going to get if you ask me that. [LAUGHTER]

AMY BERNSTEIN: I can imagine.

AMELIA RANSOM: You don’t, we don’t know each other. And I don’t know what you’re going to do with the information. But if a peer of mine that I have established trust with says, hey, I’m really trying to grow my career. I really want to do this next thing. Whatever. And I really want to understand how I can get there, I’m clear that the narrative is about them and not me. Because everybody’s not your ally. And again, as I sit at the intersection of black and female, everybody’s not my ally. So I am going to be careful with whom I share that information.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, it’s really trust. And people whom you trust enough to bring up a ticklish topic, like compensation. Right?

AMELIA RANSOM: Absolutely. We are not having this conversation if we have not established trust.

AMY BERNSTEIN: OK, well, you’ve given us an awful lot to think about. And I’m so grateful to you for all of your wise counsel on a topic that, you know, still makes a lot of us squirm a little bit.

AMELIA RANSOM: No, I’m super happy to help. I understand why it’s, you know, squirmish in a way. But that demystification has to happen. Otherwise we’re just not going to grow.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, that makes so much sense. Well, thanks again, Amelia.

AMELIA RANSOM: Oh my gosh, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Me, too. All right, I’m curious, has either of you ever shared your salary information?

NICOLE TORRES: Yes. I have shared salary information with a couple of colleagues, and with some friends.

AMY GALLO: Did they ask you, Nicole, or did you volunteer it?

NICOLE TORRES: I volunteered it. I guess I was trying to start a conversation about our salaries. I was curious about what they were making, and I was wondering, I wanted to get a better sense if I was being paid fairly. So I was trying to start a conversation. I kind of put my salary out in the open. These are people that I really trust, obviously, and yeah, I used that to kind of kick us off.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Were you clear with them that that was your purpose?

NICOLE TORRES: Yes. Yeah, I think, you know, it came out of a longer, we were talking about how we were feeling around pay and compensation and concerns we have. Like, I find that we have so many concerns about how much we make, and a lot of that concern just comes from not having a ton of information. Like, we don’t know how much we make relative to other people. If you’re not, like me, you know, in a managerial role, you don’t really know your corporate, your company’s pay scales. There’s just so much murkiness. Like, a lot about pay has been a black box. So you know, we have those conversations to try to get more information out there on the table, so we could just check how we felt about things, and whether that was close to the reality.

AMY GALLO: I’m so impressed, because I, when I was at the point you are in your career, I was so ignorant about this. I just assumed pay was fair.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh my God.

AMY GALLO: I know. Isn’t that, and I never, [LAUGHTER] you can laugh a little less. [LAUGHTER]

AMY BERNSTEIN: That’s adorable.

AMY GALLO: I know. Well, I just was like, I assume we’re all being paid the same. And I never, it wasn’t until, I think it was like my third job where I was like, oh, wait, maybe that guy, it was a guy in particular, was being paid more than I am. And I’ve definitely shared with colleagues, with coworkers who I considered friends. I’ve also shared, my family all knows what I make. And my close friends know what I make. But I haven’t done it with the same purpose you have, Nicole. Have you, Amy?

AMY BERNSTEIN: No. I never have. I have found out what peers were making. I remember once, someone in HR had left a document on the copying machine. Right?

AMY GALLO: Classic. [LAUGHTER]

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, it was totally classic. That’s what we heard, it was someone left it there. What happened afterwards was explosive.

AMY GALLO: Was it?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. But I’m going back quite a few years.

AMY GALLO: But I feel like that’s, I’ve heard that story of like someone left it open, or I saw a file on someone’s desk, and I just opened it. And I feel like in a way that would be an easier way to find out what other people make.

NICOLE TORRES: Like that is my dream. I would love if that happened. [LAUGHTER] But I’ve heard from bosses that that is their absolute worst nightmare.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, it’s, yeah. Yeah. It just, yeah. [LAUGHTER]

AMY GALLO: Well, tell us why it was explosive and why it’s a nightmare.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, so it was explosive way back when, because, you know, there was all kinds of inequity. And the guys were definitely being paid more than the women. They also had bigger titles but weren’t doing bigger work. I mean, it was really bad. The reason it’s a nightmare is that, you know, there is no right salary for any job, and there’s so many factors that go into it, including, you know, experience and kind of scope and span of control and all of that stuff. But the other thing that goes into it is your negotiating skill coming in.

AMY GALLO: Mm hm. Nicole, you say that it’s your dream to just find out, like a file, why? Why don’t you want to, it sounds like you’ve had the conversation. Is it just that the conversation’s so awkward?

NICOLE TORRES: It’s awkward, and it’s with, you know, just a few people. Like literally a handful of people who I really trust and who have opened up to me, and we’ve been able to have really hard conversations. But you know, it’s like a drop in the bucket overall of what, of the larger organization. And I think I’d be curious to know how much, I don’t know. After some of the interviews that we’ve done, and listening to your conversations with guests, I’m really on the fence about how much I think salary disclosure is a good thing and is necessary, because, you know, we’ve learned that it can have so many negative effects as well. Like, if there’s a real impact on your from finding out what coworkers make, if that is more, if that’s less than you, it affects how you think about work. It affects your motivation. But I think I would have loved more information about salary for myself for the positions around me, for positions that I’m aspiring to. I think would just have helped in terms of my negotiation skill and confidence. So I think more information, I would love to have had more information.

AMY GALLO: Well, and that’s the, that’s what the negotiation expert talked, or salary negotiation experts talk about as the information inequity in these conversations is huge.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, and Amelia was really clear about that, that you really, that you have to do the leg work. Right? You have to do everything you can do to gather as much data as you can gather.

AMY GALLO: Yeah, but I agree, Nicole. The conversation’s hard. And I think, since we’ve been working on this show, I’ve been thinking a lot about why this conversation is so hard for me and what, like one of the things I often, when I’m anxious about something, like what am I really worried will happen? And so why does this, when I think about it, what’s going to really happen if people knew what I made? And really, nothing. Like, would we really treat one another differently if we knew how much everyone made?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. And I’m not sure about that. But I do think that the gut punch of finding out that you’re being paid way less than someone you consider to be your peer is a lot to get over.

AMY GALLO: But wouldn’t you rather have the gut punch and the information than not know?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, I also want to, I want to be well-equipped to have the conversation with my manager and with HR. What I don’t want to do is say, you know, listen, I’m doing more work than this person over here. I don’t want to get into that. But Amelia made this point that you don’t make the argument, you don’t pitch the argument in terms of you. It’s not I feel. It’s, here’s why this is right for the organization.

AMY GALLO: Yeah, and I’m actually, I’ve used that tactic, so I sometimes get paid to speak, and I once was being hired to, you know, for an event, and I was talking to the organizer, and she asked me what my rate was. And I said, you know, before I give you my rate, I just want to tell you, I once heard about the story, which is the story I shared with Gaby, about you know, a woman who showed up at an event and found out the men, so I just want to be paid fairly. And she said, thank you for saying that. And she said, here’s what we’re paying the other speakers. She was very transparent about it. And I said, OK, like to be paid the highest. And she said, OK. We can do that. And it was, I thought it, I mean, it was one of those ideal, and it just, but it, I appealed to her sense of fairness, which is I think what Amelia was talking about, is that I want to be paid fairly.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, I also think that a lot of times the person who’s asking you the question, you know, the woman you were speaking to about your gig, probably just wanted the rationale for settling on a good number for you.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. And she, you know, she had a budget. I knew she had constraints. But I didn’t want to get into that situation where I named a number that was either much lower than what other people were being paid, particularly men, and I didn’t want to go way up in a way that she was like, you know, what’s going on? That doesn’t make any sense.

AMY BERNSTEIN: You wanted to be in line.

AMY GALLO: Exactly.

AMY BERNSTEIN: But you also went the extra yard, which I love. Which is, I want to be paid on the highest end.

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Good for you. I’m stealing that.

AMY GALLO: And I do think, I think it’s something, I’ve been thinking about how to help our listeners think about these salary negotiations, and I think, especially for women who we know from the research get penalized for negotiating salary, because it doesn’t align with our gender stereotypes about what women should do, is that appealing to people’s fairness could be a good tactic.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah and the other thing, you know, I go back to negotiating the initial salary, because it really starts there. Is you’ve got to ask yourself with, given the data you have, is this a job you want to do for what you consider to be too low a salary? And you’ve got to remember, you’re not going to make it up. Because it’s all incremental after that.

AMY GALLO: Right. And it is, you have to start as high as you can get.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And the thing that I keep going back to is, you know, what’s the worst that happens if you ask for a high number? They come back to you and say, no, we can’t do that. Right? And then you get, here’s our number.

NICOLE TORRES: But how would you, just to go back to what you had said, you know, when you are negotiating with an employer, and you shouldn’t make a conversation about pay all about you. You know, you work this hard, you work harder than so and so, so you should be paid more, and you want to make it about the organization. How do make that case when, of if you find out that a male colleague is making more than you? I feel like you can go in and say, you know, this should be fair. But I’m just curious what you think of that, how effective of an argument that would be.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, I’m going to think out loud here, but I would say, you know, going in and saying, you know, Bob and I do exactly the same job. And it is absolutely not right that Bob is getting paid an awful lot more than I. What I wouldn’t say is, I work harder than Bob. Right? There’s a difference there. You don’t want to swoop and poop all over Bob, if you know what I mean.

AMY GALLO: Poor Bob. But I think you could also say, you know, I know we all want to work in a place that’s fair. And Bob and I do the same job. So it seems fair that he and I would be paid the same. So rather than I, I think the difficulty is when we start making demands. That’s when we start playing into what we see in the research, is that we get penalized for doing that. But if we say, if we appeal to the greater good of like, this is what we all want, let’s just make it happen already, people.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Right. I completely agree in this, and particularly with when the conversation seems misaligned with the culture. All organizations are now talking about their culture, and they all want to be proud of their culture. And if there is a culture of open mindedness and fairness, and you’re running into the brick wall, and you can, I would invoke that. You know, I want to go to something Amelia said, which was about the mentorship conversation, where she kind of took me by surprise when she said that she talks about pay.

AMY GALLO: To her mentees.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yes. And when I kind of queried that, she said, well, any mentor who isn’t that isn’t doing the job.

AMY GALLO: And every mentor listening to this episode was shamed, I’m sure, for that.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, yeah, I shrank into my seat. Has any mentor ever talked to you about salary?

AMY GALLO: Never.

AMY BERNSTEIN: What about you, Nicole?

NICOLE TORRES: Yes.

AMY GALLO: Ooh, good.

NICOLE TORRES: But it was me bringing it up, and just saying, it was me being really upset and saying like, is this fair? And then having a conversation, you know, being talked down a little bit. That was really helpful.

AMY GALLO: And did your mentor share what they make? Or was it more general?

NICOLE TORRES: They shared what they made in, when they were in my role. So I found, and it was at a time when I was really just like, I had little information. I was trying to, the little information I had was not super positive, and so I was just, I was upset by that, and I was looking for more information. And she kind of helped me get a better sense of what I should have been upset about, what I didn’t need to be upset about. And just gave me more information. And that really, that helped me develop a plan for what I was going to do about this, which I found really useful and much better than kind of sitting and like stewing and all my thoughts about whether I was being paid unfairly.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So you got context that you needed.

NICOLE TORRES: Yes.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, sometimes the context can help. Sometimes it doesn’t. [LAUGHTER]

AMY GALLO: Sometimes it makes it worse. But I do think what you just said, Nicole, about it, you just had more information. And I think if we could think about this as information rather than our value.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I agree with you 110%. And if there’s one think we heard from all of our conversations, it’s that you have to strip the emotion out of it. You have to strip it out in trying to understand it, this information you’re getting, and you have to strip the emotion out in order to advocate for yourself.

AMY GALLO: It’s so hard.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So hard. But a friend can help you. A manager can help you.

AMY GALLO: And I actually think, for our male listeners, tell your female colleagues what you make. And it may be a gut punch. It may feel awful. But I think that is one of the best ways to close the gap, is to start sharing across lines that are typically where we see the biggest disparities.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So Amy G., should guys reveal their salaries with the same kind of purpose that we suggest women do?

AMY GALLO: Yeah. I mean, I think they should, I think they need to be held to the same standard. And the purpose is to support your female colleagues in getting what they’re paid fairly for. So yeah, they definitely need to, I think the purpose, you know, you don’t have to like throw your W2 around the office, but I think you can, if you’re interested in creating a fair, just place to work, which I hope you all are, I think, you know, you should share it, particularly if you’re mentoring a woman, particularly if there’s a close colleague who you’re concerned maybe isn’t being paid fairly. Yeah, I think we all have a responsibility to do that, and if you are in a privileged position where you think you are being paid, you know, more and in a way that’s unfair, wouldn’t you want to take action on that?

NICOLE TORRES: But I would just add to, you know, knowing how emotional this can be, and knowing like, if you really suspect that a colleague is making less than you, is being unfairly paid, if you’re being paid unfairly more than they are, like that is a gut punch realization to them, and I think you have to make room for those emotions and questions when you have that conversation, even just kind of like asking, are you ready? Do you want to have this conversation? So it’s more on their terms.

AMY GALLO: Mm, that’s a good point. Right, you don’t need to walk up to your female colleague and say, here’s what I make. Best of luck.

NICOLE TORRES: I see some, I see that backfiring maybe a little bit.

AMY GALLO: would almost be better if he said, I listened to this great episode of Women at Work podcast, and I’m really interested in pay equity. So I’m going to tell you how much I make. Would you tell me how much you make? Right? That could be, the interest in being equitable, you don’t have to sense, necessarily that someone makes less than you.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, I also think the conversation’s going to come up. Because it’s in the wind.

AMY GALLO: It is in the wind. Thankfully.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And transparency is the order of the day. So I think it’s going to come up anyway. So you have to prepare yourself for hearing, I mean, hearing that you make way more than someone you consider your peer isn’t, I imagine, a great feeling, either. You know, you really, you have to, as Nicole was saying, I think taking care of each other in this conversation is incredibly important.

NICOLE TORRES: And I mean, you have to be prepared, too, for, like it’s not, it’s a long road. If you find out some information that you really don’t like, and you go, you bring that to your manager, you bring that to HR, I think in a lot of cases, the response you get will not be like, oh, you’re right. Like, we’re paying you unfairly. We’re going to correct that right away. I think it’s like, no, there are a bunch of reasons that go into your compensation, like experience, like XYZ, and you kind of have to think through what you might hear back from your manager, from your company, and be prepared to address those things.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. I think sometimes you just have to ask a lot of questions: What are the salary bands? Why am I in that band? Why am I in that band?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yes, totally.

AMY GALLO: Where do these numbers come from? How do we compare to our competitors? Right? I almost would say, this is a series of conversations in which the first is, you just ask a ton of questions. You reflect on those. You gather other information. Then you come back, and you can make your argument Because the information asymmetry is so stark that you’re negotiating into sort of a black hole. Because you don’t know. You don’t know where those numbers come from or, we all agree, all of our experts agree, having information is important to negotiating a salary, and yet we’re also afraid to share that information. And I think with that gap between what we know works, and what we’re currently doing needs to close.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Mm hm.

AMY GALLO: All right, I’m going to go tell a few people what I make.

AMY BERNSTEIN: OK, I’m not. [LAUGHTER]

NICOLE TORRES: That’s our show. I’m Nicole Torres.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I’m Amy Bernstein.

AMY GALLO: And I’m Amy Gallo. Our editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoch, Adam Buchholz, Mary Dooe, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, and JM Olejarz.

AMY BERNSTEIN: We want to hear from you. If you have any thoughts you’d like to share on this episode, or really any episode we’ve done, email us at womenatwork@hbr.org.

NICOLE TORRES: One last thing, please subscribe to our Women at Work newsletter. It is the best place to keep up with all of the research on gender that we’re publishing, and it is where we reach out to you and ask for your stories and experiences, because that is ultimately what helps us make this show relevant to you. So please look for our newsletter and subscribe. You can find it at hbr.org/newsletters. Again, that’s hbr.org/newsletters.