+1 for glassdoor in terms of salaries
Reviews are next to useless as the genuine ones are those who've had particularly awful times and the positive ones are almost always written by their hr department
People who've had a decent experience don't tend to be arsed to write a review!
I am really passionate about mentoring younger women in my industry, and I do think that talking about money is part of this. Not because salary is a measure of one's worth and not because everyone should be aiming for the best paying jobs
But within a given industry, making sure that younger women know what they are worth to the companies who will employ them, so that they are getting paid fairly compared to their male counterparts, and commensurate with industry norms for their skillset and level of experience.
I mentor a few younger women, and the women who've mentored me have helped me enormously
Money is a tiny part of this, but it doesn't serve us well to ignore it
On a similar thread a few months ago I shared a salary benchmarking survey for my industry, and one poster (who was working freelance in the same industry after having 4 DC) said she realised that actually her skills were in greater demand than she'd realised, and that actually she could be considering opportunities she'd thought were out of her reach - and that she could have been charging a lot more / under selling herself. That's just off a MN discussion about salary!
The gender pay gap is a much broader issue (women in lower paid occupations, taking most of the burden for caring for DC, elderly parents etc), but specifically for pay inequality, where women are paid less than men for the same job, a factor is that companies pay what they can get away with. Blokes aren't inherently worth more than their female colleagues, but they're often more demanding.
In many professional occupations male and female graduates start off on equal pay. But as they progress, the gap starts to widen
- Men are often more aggressive in negotiating pay rises
- Larger pay increases come from moving jobs - men will often go in with higher salary expectations / bump up their current salary to go into negotiations from a higher baseline. A woman may be coming in on a lower salary, and be more honest about it, so she's going into negotiations from a lower baseline, and may negotiate less aggressively.
The gap widens even before women start having DC
This is a very narrow window on certain types of jobs where salary negotiations are even possible
Clearly this is irrelevant for the majority of occupations
But where there is scope to challenge pay inequality, we need to have more transparency. Like Carrie Gracey at the BBC