From $0 to 6 Figures - A Woman's Worth
Women are undervalued in the workplace. They're undervalued by men and by women. Contrarily men tend to be overvalued, by both genders.
One of the only ways to hold companies accountable is for us to hold each other accountable. Pay secrecy isn't helping anyone and it certainly isn't helping women. So to pull down the curtains, hell, to pull off the window, I wanted to release everything I earn. My hours, my salary, my bonuses. For simplicity, this is my straight take-home pay. It doesn't account for benefits (generally around 30% of your income) and taxes (I'm in the 24% tax bracket).
You can visit the interactive dashboard here though I encourage you to read it with the negotiation narrative.
$33k
For my internship I worked as an environmental engineer. In engineering, the internships are paid and let's be honest: companies are making a fortune off cheap labor. I thought I was making a fortune! I lived with my parents, often commuting over an hour home in the evenings, but had no home expenses. Except for the guilty clothes shopping habit I had at the time. I saved and saved. I was not financially saavy with what I did with that money and I remember the look on my dad's face when I told his financial assistant how much was just sitting in the bank. It is another privilege I have that my dad is financially saavy and likes to teach it to all his kids, including the girls. This was the start of my financial learning.
$25k
I approached the GIS professor during my last semester and asked to work in his lab. I had done it more for the experience and opportunity than the pay though again, I was privileged enough to not expect the pay going into it. I worked very few hours and in the end, was given no direction, no tasks, and felt like I had very little value to contribute. I had not learned yet that sometimes the value is in creating a task for yourself and then figuring out why its useful. I was glad when the semester was over. Data note: I worked hourly (and very few hours) so the graph shows my actual pay; $25k is the equivalent salary for if I was full time.
$49k
When I graduated and had my full Engineer-In-Training license, I was hired on for a co-op at the same company I interned for. The office manager casually sent an email with my new hourly salary. I was shocked. I hadn't expected a raise. When I went into his office to thank him he looked at me sincerely and said “is that a fair amount?” I was grateful I had a job between undergrad (I graduated a semester early) and the new year for grad school. This would not be the last time I hadn't thought to look out for myself but my male mentors had. Looking at the number now, it seems very minor to what they should have offered me (and he probably thought that too given his question), given that I was bringing on new hires, training them, and completing project management and technical work in the small office. I was doing the role of a PM and project engineer. I had female friends who had taken less salary for full-time positions and I had, in a double standard, asked them why they hadn't negotiated for higher.
$22k
During graduate school I was funded through a TA position. This meant that in addition to my classes, my research, and anything extra I did for the department, I taught classes. Some semesters were easier than others. The most rigorous semester was the only one where I actually got the equivalent of a $22k salary. In the academia world, this salary is pretty good. They pay the out-of-state tuition part and I was funded through other scholarships as well. The RA position I did for my advisor was well paid and the second TA position I had was well paid. I managed to make it out of grad school without debt, something a lot of my peers cannot say. I did depend on money I had saved up previously to live comfortably.
$0k
Instead of pursuing my phd, I took the plunge into the world of unemployment. I lived with my parents (bring on the jokes about my parent's basement) and lived off the money I had saved from before grad school. It was just about depleted (I was just about fully mental from boredom) by the time I found a job. I don't do well with not being productive and working. I was the kid who had three jobs in high school… at the same time… and used it to buy myself a bmw on my 18th birthday.
$61k
I was hired on at this salary for my first full-time position. I had a grad degree, EIT license, and consulting/field work experience. It was not easy finding my first job and so I sympathize with the struggle of graduates. I, for the first time, decided to negotiate my salary. I wanted to show the company that I could negotiate on their behalf too. My mother helped walk me through how to gracefully ask for more money. They didn't offer me more but I was able to secure a $3000 relocation bonus, contingent on me staying with them for 2 years (which I did).
They say that when chosen by male supervisors, the opening salary in a job requisition is lower than those chosen by a woman. Women play the game on if the negotiation is worth the discomfort. But men negotiate and they expect that everyone else does too.
My very first raise the next year was 1%, much lower than inflation. For young professionals, they are often learning every single day and are by no means treading water in their careers. They're challenging themselves and moving. I hit the ground running even after the project I'd been hired to support had gotten pulled by the client. I jumped into an 18-hour-day project to meet the needs of a client, a US state looking for water supply for their biggest city. Meanwhile, our company laid off 5% of its employees. Most employees also got this lackluster raise that year… though for an employee making $150,000 versus an employee making $61,000, the 1% is much different. I was incredibly disappointed as part of my hiring negotiation was a revisit of my asking salary at the 6-month mark. I'd cycled through 2 supervisors by then so that promise had gotten lost in the shuffle. I was told during my yearly review that I should be happy to have gotten any raise, having been hired only 8 months before and with the company going through pains. Not that my contract is linked to the profits of the company as a CEO's would be.
It was a poor choice of words by an engineer: devaluing me and diminishing my worth, meanwhile mistaking company worth as having a hand in meritocracy of a single entry-level employee who was over 100% billable. I've always been money-driven. To me, a raise is a showing of my value to the company. Each one is an honor, in addition to the yearly inflation raise.
$63k
My third (or fourth?) supervisor was a woman who is one of the strongest women advocates I know. She's also one of the fairest and most direct people I know. While I was out doing another 18-hour day 2-month grueling field work project, she reviewed all of her new supervisee's salaries and brought it to HR. It was called an "equity" raise though as we heard it, HR knew that employees in Austin and Nashville were still undercompensated by the algorithm even with this raise. This is a product of being in a housing bubble and the market not actually corresponding in engineering. This problem is persistent in all fields, not just STEM. At this point, I am making over the median US household income. And I'm just one person. I thought it was great. As you've seen, I have often undervalued my contributions. The lens I use to view the world is gender-biased: I see raises as "lucky" and exceptional. Men see raises as entitlement.
$65k
At this point in my career, I was under the assumption that if I did good work and nudged people into noticing that I was still an Engineer 1 that they'd realize that I needed to be promoted. I was an entry-level in the system but studying to take the PE test which tended to be the stop gate to promotion to an Engineer 3. To me, the PE was just another goal I had to check off. I claimed my previous intern time and 1 year of graduate studies so that I could become a PE faster. In Texas, you can sit for the PE exam before being eligible which I was all about. My next-cubicle coworker one day was chatting with my boss lady and mentioned I was still an E1. She promoted me. I took a backseat (well, backseat driver) and it worked for me because I had coworkers who remembered to advocate for me louder than I did for myself. After my promotion she IMed me to come to her office. I walked over with a bounce in my step expecting a "congratulations, you earned this". Instead she looked me straight in the eyes and told me "next time, you need to advocate for yourself" and that was the end of that conversation. Yikes.
$77k
So next time I did. I let everyone and their pets know when I passed the PE and was promoted to Engineer 3.
At my old company we were able to recognize anyone, at any time, for bonuses. Some coworkers took advantage of this benefit and others did not. I was one that used it to find ways to recognize and reward my coworkers and often they thought of me in return. This has the effect of the Obama-admin amplification: we repeat things after other women until we can recognize others without those women getting penalized for touting their own accomplishments. This was one of the greatest perks of the job and something I messaged the integration office about when we were acquired. They didn't keep it, opting for a program that was more suited for appealing to the shareholders and something that I have often thought was a mistake in incorporating a process of top-down management that is easily susceptible to gender and race exclusivity. Systems that need management approval have an unconscious bias towards promoting people that look just like management. People that make management feel like they're looking at themselves in their youth. Young white men have a distinct advantage.
At one point, everyone worked a hard 4-month emergency project. With money still in the bonus bank, my boss's boss's boss okayed an abnormally high $2000 bonus. I put everyone else's through and then by the time someone I had asked had put mine through… the bucket was empty. And you better bet I let everyone know that I hadn't gotten my hard-earned $2000 bonus. I never got it the following year either as we'd been purchased by a bigger company. This is a risky decision, as implicit bias doesn't look well on women who tout their own accomplishments too loud. As a tiny attractive female, I have found that I can safely have a bigger personality than other women. It's a game of balances and privilege.
$80k
So I used that money-driven, goal-oriented, attention-to-detail, loud-personality part of me and I asked for another raise. I was helping to run a program and laid out, in powerpoint and 2-page text the financial benefits to the company and how small of an ask a $30k raise would be. Because of the raw multiplier, I argued, it made business sense to pay me adequately for the services I was contributing. To no one's surprise I did not get that salary increase but my (new) supervisor did negotiate a $3k raise on my behalf. I'll take it!
You'll notice a phenomenon that is all too common: Men get promoted and raises based on potential, women based on performance. We have to make extra laps around the track. It's a form of discrimination but much harder to identify and control against. I've had amazing champions and mentors so far in my career but it's still obvious to me the lengths I've felt necessary to justify merit increases. And how long and arduous of a process those were. I've even had to justify non-merit increases (such as that 1% raise) and still never got it. You aren't successful purely by yourself and this is absolutely true for women. The louder your supporters are, the better we do collectively.
Another thing I learned during this process is that you can't argue that you're underpaid based on living expenses. I'm not sure why not, especially with retention being such a big issue amongst millennials and their excessive college debt, but companies aren't financially motivated to pay more than what market value would pay. Even if their role in that city is limiting their financial comfort simply by needing to be in that city for that job. I understand why this is done as a business model, but as for corporate moral responsibility, we've got a long way to go in this industry. It favors upper-middle class homeowners (hi, that's me).
$90k
As part of the previous negotiations, I wanted to metaphorically move. I don't like stagnation just like many of my millennial career-oriented friends. I was transitioning into a project management role and I knew that I could still do technical work and be a PM at my company. I always felt like I could change titles and roles without being constrained to a single-path ladder. So for the next step in my career-scaffold, I had requested a title change to PM along with the underfunded $30k ask. It took several months to go through but finally I was promoted in alignment with the value I was bringing my current client. I then made sure they were billing adequately for me as one of my first duties as PM. As I've said, I count how other people value my worth in terms of dollars, aka money-driven. It's not actually about the money, it's about the value and how I value myself. It's like looking at your bank statement, money is in there because you give worth to it, not because there is a vault somewhere with your money locked away.
I've just gotten my yearly raise (which I now get in December instead of the following April, an improvement over the delayed increase which doesn't denote a meritocracy). Counting overtime, my yearly earnings is above 6 figures. They say that the higher the salaried woman, the more she has to downplay her accomplishments to be liked (and thus supported enough to continue her career progression). I truly believe that the more women who advocate for themselves, just like men do, the better we all are together. But I realize that the onus is not on an individual woman especially with the steep cost that can befall women without such great advocates in their lives.
I am valuable. I do a great job at work and I'm recognized for it.
I'm interested in what you make, if you negotiated for it, and what sort of limbo you played on advocating for yourself within a biased system. Drop me a DM and let's chat!
Reading: Radical Candor by Kim Scott - she's worked in Silicon Valley, even for Cheryl Sandberg and now coaches bosses. I just finished it and loved it. Lots of good advice and some of which I am trying to implement in my teams.
Working: Drafting a storage curve TM to show how much water will fill into the reservoir and at what rate. I'm building two graphs: for the visual storage curve and for the third order polynomial to describe the curve. This polynomial will become embedded in the SCADA system to operate the reservoir.
Listening: Us Against You by Frederick Backman. I love how this author shows how everyone is breaking. He lays it out so simply that it packs such a big stomach punch. Highly recommend his book My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry.