Share Your Salary

I ran across a really interesting article in Pink Magazine the other day about the ongoing struggle for pay equity. In it, journalist Christina Boufis makes a case for salary transparency.
She leads the article with a fascinating anecdote. Apparently Gloria Steinem once told a room full of corporate execs that they should pick one woman in the room and make a pact to always be honest with one another about their salaries. Paula Henderson, one of the young women in the room, made just such a pact, and through twenty years of career changes and economic ups and downs, she estimates that having that transparency made she and her pact partner about three million dollars!
Now certainly many of us aren’t working in the same kind of lucrative field that Henderson and her partner are, but it really made me think about my own relationship to money when it comes to friends and colleagues. I’ve always been pretty transparent, partly because of my feminist values, but also because I think I’ve always hungered for the camaraderie of others who struggle with the freelance lifestyle (it’s all feast and famine). But now I think I’m going to be even more transparent.
I urge you to send this post to someone you’d like to create a transparency pact with and ask her if she’s down for the long haul. Or, if you’re feeling really brave, just make a pact with yourself that you’ll tell any and all other women how much you make if it looks like it might help them leverage their own salary negotiations or just make them better informed.