Ask Women and Work
Question: I’ve been hearing murmurings about salaries at my workplace, and I suspect I’m not making as much money as my peers and comparable positions in my industry. How can I figure out whether my wage is competitive? It’s stressing me out, but should I maybe just let it go?
We asked Sarah Stockdale, founder and CEO of Growclass, to tackle this one:
First, you have to collect information in order to validate whether your hypothesis is correct.
There are a couple of ways to do that. You can do research on the internet by looking on Glassdoor, LinkedIn or comparing salaries that are listed in job postings. But the best way to figure out if you’re being paid equitably in your organization is to talk to trusted coworkers about their salaries.
Conversations about salary are super taboo and that protects power structures, so we need to break those taboos down. It is completely legal in Canada to talk about salaries, even if an employee handbook tells you not to. But what you want to do is be sensitive to how these conversations are perceived. Approach it gently, saying, ‘Hey, I have been uncovering this information; I want to make sure that we are all being compensated equitably and fairly. One of the best ways to do that is for us to share. I’m happy to share if you’re comfortable with that. It’s totally okay if you’re not.’
Not everyone will be comfortable, but I do want to urge men to have these conversations more often. Women often uncover this information because of what we know about the gender pay gap. But if we create more of a sense of responsibility for men to also offer this information willingly to their colleagues, we will have better transparency in terms of what the pay gap looks like at different workplaces.
If you do see a gap, you’re going to need to address it. In the question you said, ‘It’s stressing me out – should I let it go?’ First of all, you’re going to think about this all the time. You’re not going to be able to let it go. And second, you deserve to be compensated fairly. And that often requires uncomfortable adult conversations.
The best way to approach that conversation with your manager is with curiosity. If you go into it guns blazing, angry and resentful, that is not going to go well for either of you. My friends Melissa and Johnathan Nightingale at Raw Signal Group have trained my brain when it comes to these kinds of conversations. When you’re in that moment of being angry, they would say, ‘How can you empathize with your manager and make sure that they have what they need to have this conversation?’
Tell your manager, ‘I’d like to have a conversation about my compensation. We can talk about it at our next one-on-one [meeting], or you can push that out if you need time to talk to your counterparts in HR.’ You want to give your manager the ability to answer your questions with good information.
If you have that conversation with your manager and you don’t get what you are asking for, then you need to make some choices. You now have information about the market and how your company values you. Often the best way to get a large compensation bump is by changing jobs. As much as this might be a job that you love doing, you deserve to be fairly paid for your time.
