What is fair pay?
I’ve been thinking about information on salaries ever since Gary, Christina, and Leland’s SVA Class on Entrepreneurial Design. On that Saturday, I met with Rachel, a designer and student who was building a project around the Wage Gap. She wanted to help empower employees, especially designers, to get fairly compensated.
The current wage gap has two sides to it, the companies providing the compensation and the individuals asking for the compensation. Some companies have a compensation range and then rely on employee negotiations to set salaries. Other companies, which now includes Reddit, decide on the compensation and do not take negotiation from the employee into consideration.
Given these two scenarios, the wage gap still exists because employees aren’t negotiating to their potential salary or companies are not determining pay fairly.
As an individual, it’s hard to know where you net out. Should you try to negotiate for more money? What is the fair market value of your time? If you are returning to the workforce from school or home, what should your salary expectation be? There are a lot of questions but not a ton of great resources to get clear answers on the topic.
Thankfully, Rachel has taken this on as her mission for Let’s Talk About Pay. She’s created a resource dedicated to opening up the compensation questions in order to create more transparency and confidence for those entering the workforce. If this is a topic you care about, I’d encourage you to participate:
- Take a quick survey for Rachel’s project.
- Contribute your stories or experiences to the conversation.
I admire Rachel’s work and look forward to seeing the discussion continue. Fair wage is important and should be a conversation with more transparency.
Something to share?
I want to hear from you! If you have something to add or challenge, please share in the comments below or on Twitter.
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