How We're Making Transparent Pay Work For Women
By Vanessa Bruce
I first learned I was underpaid in a dimly lit dive bar near the office. As we drank our beers and shared nachos, the conversation turned to chat about salaries. I sat in shock as I overheard many of my peers made nearly double my salary. Up until that point I was proud of my salary. I had doubled it in a span of two years.
What happened? I had negotiated, and worked with a recruiter. Why was I still undervalued?
In my experience, offers weren’t based on what the company valued for the position. To that point, each salary bump throughout my career was based on my previous wage, rooting back from my very first job offer in 2009. As a first generation college student graduating during the height of a recession, I was grateful for my first “real” job. I didn’t realize my starting salary would follow me for years to come.
Since then, Massachusetts has made it illegal to ask your current salary in a job interview, a move to help close the wage gap. It’s a great step but, as a founder, I believe we can tackle the problem at a company level with transparent pay.
Let’s talk about transparent pay.
Knowing what your colleagues make can be a powerful tool in closing the pay gap — that’s why we’ve always believed in transparent pay at Dough.
While creating our scale, there are companies setting the model that we were inspired by (check out Buffer) and some great reads from Time and Forbes. Everyone on our team knows what each other is paid, as well as level and career path. We can talk openly about pay, growth, and our company’s financial model. Transparency is at our core.
The nitty-gritty aka how we made our scale.
While making our pay scale, we needed to be competitive with Boston’s startup community while being mindful of being a seed stage company. We created a model where everyone has a Seed base salary, with a guaranteed bump when we raise our Series A. We share in each other’s successes.
We were primarily inspired by both Buffer’s multiplier approach and the State of Massachusetts’ levels and steps (side note, my mother and husband both work for the state).
Our simple formula is:
Base Salary X Level Multiplier = Salary
(Check out our scale here.)
The Base Salary is determined by researching average salaries in Boston while the Level Multiplier signifies a position’s level such as Account Coordinator (Level 1) or Marketing Director (Level 3).
Closing the gap.
As we grow we’ll be able to hold ourselves and our team accountable to closing the pay gap through transparent pay. Being a founder comes with a lot of responsibilities, but it also offers plenty of opportunity to create the workplace you wish you had. I never want one of my employees to experience what I did in that pub with my co-workers.