It’s not up to women to negotiate up their salaries, it’s up to bosses to pay fairly
The gender pay gap robbed me of £20,000 As a leader, I won’t let it happen to my team, writes Elizabeth Ames
“One final question: what salary are you expecting for this role?”
The dreaded moment in any job interview. Go too low, and you risk being underpaid relative to your colleagues. Go too high and risk pricing yourself out of the role entirely.
It’s also a question that entrenches the UK’s stubborn gender pay gap, as I have seen first-hand. In interviews for a previous role, I was asked to nominate my salary despite having very little context on industry averages. While in the job I always thought I was slightly underpaid, but when I left I discovered that the man who replaced me in the role was paid £20,000 per year more than I had been. I never would have known if he hadn’t happened to share his salary expectations with me. Moreover, given that future salaries are often based on previous ones, it is a question that compounds pay inequality every time it is asked.
Today, on International Women’s Day, many of us will share funny tweets from the Gender Pay Gap Bot, which uses statistics on organisations’ pay gaps to call out their empty platitudes about gender equality. This will no doubt be accompanied by opinion pieces urging women to lean in, ask for more, or build their negotiation skills.
Whilst well-meaning, all of these solutions place the onus for fixing the gap on the women who are impacted by it, and not the companies perpetrating the problem. Analysis from the Chartered Management Institute finds that the majority of UK managers have said their organisation does not use gender pay gap data to make a positive difference, with only 17 per cent saying their company takes appropriate action to address the inequalities this data exposes.
Why aren’t we asking organisations to implement a practical and easy solution? Commit to pay transparency. If it had been in place for my previous role, pay transparency would have ensured I knew my worth and didn’t have to rely on a whisper network to understand what I should have asked for in the first place.
When I joined Atalanta three and a half years ago as its first chief operating officer, doubling down on pay transparency was one of my first priorities. As a strategic communications agency founded on a commitment to gender equality, the company had always paid at or above sector averages for roles and had a strict rule against unpaid internships, always paying the London living wage. It already had internal pay bands, so it was a natural next step to share them with the team.
Since then, we have developed a career progression policy, with fully transparent pay bands for each role and clarity on the skills and experience expected from staff at each level to enable them to understand how to progress. We also publish our pay bands in external job descriptions when we recruit new staff, ensuring candidates know what the salary expectations are before applying for the role, and we never base incoming salaries on previous earnings. In fact, after reviewing their skills and experience against our career progression policy, we have often paid new recruits more than they have asked for at interview.
Atalanta is also committed to financial transparency, sharing our company results and forward projections with the entire team during our quarterly meetings. Not only does this build critical financial literacy, but it also empowers our team to understand how their work contributes to the company as a whole and places their salaries and bonuses in context.
Over the years I have heard people argue that pay transparency creates tension within teams and risks giving competitors information they can use to poach your staff. I’ve even seen the argument that publishing salaries on job advertisements prevents candidates with imposter syndrome from applying. The truth is that companies that value their staff fairly and are transparent about salaries create a culture of trust and respect, improving retention and making themselves more attractive to potential recruits.
The UK’s culture of pay secrecy places an unfair burden on job seekers and compounds the gender pay gap. So for International Women’s Day this year, rather than sharing memes or asking women to do more, let’s ask leaders to commit to pay transparency within their organisations. It’s really the least we can do.