Generation Z is known for sharing everything about their lives online – from their outfits to their latest meals. Now they’re splitting their wages, defying a long-held taboo and troubling employers in the process.
If you meet Hannah Williams on the street, you have to expect a rather probing question: “What do you do and how much do you earn?”
Ms. Williams, 25, is the founder of Salary Transparent Street – a TikTok account with over 850,000 followers and 16.7 million likes. In her videos, she travels to different US cities, urging people on the streets to stop and share their jobs and salaries.
Ms Williams said she started these videos based on her own career experience when she realized she was underpaid. After that, she started discussing her career on TikTok, where she said her followers really responded to her openness about salary.
“It’s not something people talk about, but it should be. That should be normal, and the more I learned about the gender pay gap and the racial pay gap, I thought, ‘This has got to be a thing’ — and my answer to that was the creation of Salary Transparent Street,” she said.
She’s not the only one asking these questions. Younger generations are pushing for pay transparency – the practice of openly sharing pay with others – with viral tweets, memes and TikTok accounts.
Some legislators are taking this into account. On Tuesday, California became the latest state to require all employers with more than 15 employees to post a salary range for job openings, and that the state tracks data on how salaries vary by race, gender and ethnicity . Gen Z TikTokers who had backed the law cheered.
Other states and cities have enacted similar laws. While some employers have resisted disclosing salaries in the past, experts say the tide is turning.
In the US, talking about salaries has long been considered impolite. dr Ricardo Perez-Truglia, an assistant professor at the University of California Berkeley, said it was something of a discussion about self-esteem.
“On average, salaries are a signal of how valuable you are to employers. So it’s not surprising that some people are uncomfortable talking about their salary, just as they might be uncomfortable talking about their school grades,” he said.
Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at Glassdoor, a site that hosts company reviews and job salary estimates, agreed. It can be a “deep source of anxiety,” he said — nobody wants to be an outlier if they’re overpaid or underpaid, and the fear of finding yourself there discourages a willingness to share.
- Do you want to know how much your colleagues earn?
- The wage gap between men and women is not narrowing
But there’s plenty of evidence that younger generations prefer to share personal information online. According to surveys, this also includes salary.
“As with most social movements, as always, it’s the younger generations who are leading the way,” said Maria Colacurcio, CEO of Syndio, a platform that conducts pay equity analytics.
According to LinkedIn Market Research, over 80% of Gen Z believe that sharing pay will improve pay equity. Millennials are not far behind at 75% agreement. With every older generation, this sentiment is decreasing – 47% of Gen Xers agree and only 28% of Baby Boomers agree.
Ms Williams’ experience is consistent with this research, she said: Gen Zers and Millennials are much more likely to say yes to her when approached to share their salary on video, and women agree more often than men.
Some people, including Ms Williams, believe pay transparency will help close gender and racial pay gaps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women earn 82 cents for every dollar a man earns — with women of color often earning even less.
When travel writer Victoria Walker decided to quit her job, she took to Twitter to reveal how much she’d made while sharing a job posting for her successor.
She did it to put power back in the hands of employees, she said.
“Being a travel journalist is full of mystique” and “in our own newsrooms there isn’t much transparency about pay,” she said.
Some studies of real-life examples have shown that when salaries are disclosed, the gender pay gap narrows.
In 2006, Denmark began requiring companies to publish gender pay gaps – a recent survey found that the gender pay gap has narrowed by 2%. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the gender pay gap narrowed by 20-40% when Canada passed public sector pay disclosure laws.
According to Mr. Terrazas, opaque pay makes it difficult to decipher whether it was based on something acceptable – like relevant experience in the labor market – or whether it was based on something widely considered discriminatory – like race or gender in the labor market.
There could be potential downsides, experts warn. The Harvard Business Review warns of some pitfalls to avoid, such as “salary compression,” meaning new hires could earn the same wages as long-time employees.
Although employees’ right to talk to each other about wages has been enshrined in national law for 90 years, some US employees report pressure not to talk about the issue.
A 2022 Glassdoor-Harris Poll found that 28% of employees say their employer discourages them from speaking to co-workers about pay.
Just last year, Apple shut down a Slack channel where employees discussed salaries. According to Apple, this channel did not comply with Slack’s Terms of Service.
When Colorado enacted its pay transparency law in January 2021, some remote work employers attempted to circumvent the law by opening jobs to everyone but Colorado residents. This was so common that a Colorado resident created a website for all the companies except for the Colorado applicants.
But as more states pass similar laws, it’s becoming harder for employers to avoid the harsh debates about salaries. California, the most populous state and home to tech giants like Apple and Meta, will enact its pay transparency law next year.
That will have far-reaching implications, Ms Colacurcio said.
“We can no longer get away with saying this job is open to all remote workers except Colorado,” she said. “And now the companies in California are saying, alright, we have to comply.”
As for Ms. Williams, the TikToker, her salary disclosure sparked her own career renaissance.
She quit her job as a senior data analyst making $115,000 (£106,000) to pursue full-time content creation for Salary Transparent Street. She’s on track to make $150,000 this year.
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