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ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Harv, how do you feel about talking about money? Are you comfortable talking about money?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Oh, it's a pretty loaded question, I would say. I work for a financial institution so all I talk about is money.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Even in a personal context, when it's like outside of business matters?

HARVINDER WADHWA: Ah, that's a totally different question.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: You just said money!

HARVINDER WADHWA: Yeah, so no, no. I feel very uncomfortable talking about anybody's personal finances. That's a taboo. And I believe my organization doesn't even allow that. I could be wrong. And also it's very uncomfortable. What is there to benefit if you are making more or less money than your peer? Am I supposed to feel inferior or are they supposed to feel superior? What's the point? So it's better to avoid this topic.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I feel like when it comes to talking about my own money, you know, I like the idea of being more transparent with salary and making it a less taboo topic. But I always have this irrational fear that if someone knows the number, they're going to be able to plug that into Google and hack my bank account and like take all of it.

HARVINDER WADHWA: OK, OK. OK, OK. Let's answer that question first. So I have already said I work for a financial institution and I can guarantee you, this is my personal guarantee, that if anybody plugs your salary number in Google, your bank account is 100 per cent safe. Don't you ever worry about that.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Well, I really appreciate the personal reassurance for sure. Yeah, but I get you that this conversation is really uncomfortable, and I'm sure it is for lots of people. I've also heard that pay transparency and being open about salary can be a really important thing in terms of making our workplaces more equitable. So I'm curious to see why we got here, why talking about money is so tough in the first place and where to go from here. So from we two, who have never asked this question, we should talk to someone who has. This is my friend Monica.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Welcome to our show, Monica.

MONICA: Hi. So nice to join you guys.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: At your old workplace, you actually decided to ask your colleagues how much they made. What led up to that decision?

MONICA: I was working as part of the marketing department for a startup tech company here in Toronto. And at first it was fine. However, as time went on and my responsibilities increased, I started to feel like I was being underpaid. And so that got me to thinking “hey, am I actually being underpaid?" And that's where it all started, basically.

HARVINDER WADHWA: How did you ask that question?

MONICA: So I actually, like I wrote out a script, which is hilarious because like my coworkers, like we have lunch together, we're always chatting and I had to write out a script to talk to them. It was ridiculous because just this question, it was uncomfortable. And so basically it boils down to, "hey, I was just wondering how much you make?" very simple, straight to the point. Eight out of ten times they just answered right away. They were at first a little taken aback, it's like, "oh, you're asking me that, okay question registered.”

HARVINDER WADHWA: Wow.

MONICA: There's only about 20 per cent, I feel like that was like "I'm not comfortable sharing that"" which to which I say "Completely fine! Do you want to go grab coffee?"

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: And then never talk to them again. So I'm assuming that you were asking your peers as opposed to anybody who is like outside your department or somebody who's less relevant to you?

MONICA: Absolutely. Yeah, I yeah. I only like ask the people that I was working with closely. Yeah.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: And what did you find out from asking them? Were your suspicions confirmed?

MONICA: Yes, absolutely. What I was actually what I found pretty interesting is when I asked all my female coworkers, they made around the same as I was, and we all felt like we were underpaid and doing too much work. However, in our team, there were a couple, a few male colleagues. And I want to make an interesting note to say that when I asked the question, "how much do you make?" all of my male colleagues right away bragged about it like, "oh, this is how much I make, boom!" The people who hesitated a bit were all women. And what I found out was a little bit jarring for me, the men made twice as much as we did.

HARVINDER WADHWA: No way!

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Wow.

HARVINDER WADHWA: No way, twice?

MONICA: Literally twice as much. And yeah, exactly. And what angered me a little bit at a time was that there were several people like the male colleagues. I was actually helping them do their work. I was helping them do part of their work for them. Adding to my overworking because it wasn't even my job description but like, “oh, Monica, you're good at this, help me with this. I'm like, OK, sure.” Because during our conversation, I also told them how much I make and they were like "oh, OK." It wasn't like a shock, which I kind of wish that they were like, "oh my God, that's not acceptable at all. You should ask for a raise!".

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right, right.

MONICA: Most of them, yeah, they just accepted it. It's like, all right, cool.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Monica, everything you said was shocking. First I thought it'd be 10, 15 per cent. Not fair, but that's what the stats say. So I assumed that that would mean that. And then secondly, they're doing less work and not getting charged. I mean, this is totally a new level.

MONICA: Yeah, it was quite a shock to me as well. I mean, I certainly hope it's not the case everywhere.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right. Yeah. So after this all happened, did you end up asking for that raise you wanted?

MONICA: I did, because I was livid. You can imagine. I wasn't just asking for a 10 per cent raise, I thought I was justified for me to ask for a 25 per cent raise. And because of the amount of work I was doing and of like how much everyone else was being paid. So that whole entire process took three months from my first initial meeting to when they finally approved, I think it was even less than 10 per cent. They finally approved, I think about 8.5 per cent, some obscure a number of a pay raise. It was like, you know what, it's fine. It's a win because it's the principle that mattered to me at the time, right?

HARVINDER WADHWA: No, but Monica, you are paid 50 per cent. And by getting a eight per cent or even 10 per cent raise, you are still and if you do the math right, you are still paid 45 per cent lower than what you should have been paid.

MONICA: That is true.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So that was not a win in my eyes.

MONICA: Well, you know, small steps. Small baby steps. Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Fair. What happened next? Were there any consequences of you doing this?

MONICA: Well after a while I actually ended up leaving the company a little while after that. And what was quite interesting is after I left, most of my female coworkers also ended up leaving because we were all a little bit disgruntled at being underpaid, being underappreciated, undervalued, and eventually we just all moved on.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Looking back on this experience, would you change anything about what you did?

MONICA: Nope, I would not. Even though it was scary, I feel like it was a growing moment for me, definitely. And I will also say that for my coworkers, several of my women, female coworkers, and they said that it was cool, that I was asking that question because they were always afraid to ask.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

MONICA: One of my coworkers, she actually move on to another company before I did even. And she said that she was able to negotiate her new salary and what she's never done before.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

MONICA: So just small little moves like that. I feel like it's important. And she got the as she got the salary that she wanted, which is great, which is just like yes, it was it was a great celebration moment, but. Yeah, but that all started from like having the guts to ask this question.

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ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Monica is not the only one with this kind of experience, here's a voice note from Kadrah, who's also all for talking about money with your coworkers.

KADRAH: So I was working as a student employee and I had one other coworker that was also a student. They were hiring two new student roles. And I saw the rate and it was about five dollars more than I made. And it was roles that myself and my coworker would have been training. And I was like, that's kind of bizarre for me to be training these people who are making more money than me, like what's going on here? That's what led me to asking my coworker at the time how much she made. I message her to ask, “hey, you know, not trying to be weird and you don't have to answer this, but how much do you make right now? Like, what is your hourly rate?” This person did confirm that she was also making five dollars more than me. So I approached my manager. My manager was a Black woman and I'm also a Black woman and my coworker is a white woman. My manager was really like, “hey, you know, this is not the first time that they've done stuff like this to Black people.” I also had the possibility that my supervisor was also just a negligent person because he had been negligent with my pay in the past. So it could have been that he's bad at his job and this is racism or no, this was actually just purely racism or no this was purely he's just bad at his job. I ended up going to H.R. That didn't really take me anywhere. It was the first time that I learned that H.R. is meant to protect your employer more than they're meant to protect you. Throughout this entire thing, I just remember feeling so upset and confused and like I had been wronged. I'm definitely happy that a situation like that happened early in my life because it really changed how I understand pay and money and transparency within jobs and I would never feel awkward about it or strange about it. Since that last job, I haven't actually taken a job that pays me less than that. I think it's essential that people discuss their pay with their coworkers to ensure historical inequities don't persist. Especially as a racialized person, as a woman, as a queer person like these are things that I can't just let go. I need to always assure that I'm being treated fairly because there are histories where people like myself have not been treated fairly.

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HARVINDER WADHWA: Elena, in Monica's case she was working in an office, but the conversations would be very different if one is not working in an office setting.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Well, as the resident millennial of the show, I think this could be my answer to most things. But I've seen this conversation about salary and pay in general, happening a lot on Twitter.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Twitter, OK.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: What is this, Twitter?

L. L. McKINNEY: I am L.L. McKinney. I go by Elle, urban fantasy author extraordinaire.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Elle started the viral hashtag #PublishingPaidMe. It asked authors to share what they've been paid for their books to bring attention to how authors of colour, especially Black women, are paid less.

L. L. McKINNEY: The conversation around how much people are paid isn't a new one. It's like women are only paid so much, but then it gets broken down, you know, to Black women are paid this much Latinx, Latino women are paid this much, so forth and so on. So publishing has also been having this and similar conversations.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

L. L. McKINNEY: So 2020, which was a year, we're in the throes of it, right this summer when everything just sort of explodes. And Tochi Onyebuchi, who's another YA [young adult] author, was on Twitter and he said something to the effect of, "hey, allies, you know, if y'all are wanting to do this diversity and inclusion thing, you're going to have to be ready to have the hard conversation around money." And a bunch of people were agreeing with him. We're like, yeah, you're right, we should talk about it and then we're not talking about it. I got frustrated and I started yelling on Twitter, which is what I do when I'm frustrated. And I was essentially saying things like, "y'all not doing anything. You're not saying that, no one's putting up numbers." Like that's what we're here to talk about. If you wanna have the conversation, let's have it, put up your numbers. Fifteen, twenty minutes after my initial saying that I'm like, "do you guys need a hashtag? Here #PublishingPaidMe" say something. There was no plan. It was a fit of passion, just egged on by such frustration and anger, rightfully so, at people who always want to have the conversation and that's as far as they get, is they want to talk about it. So I think it was an ally named Nita. Nita was the first that I saw use the hashtag to tweet what they had been given for their debut. And then the next was, is a non-Black person of colour, and she tweeted and it just started to grow from there. Didn't expect what happened, didn't expect what came next. Neither me nor Tochi. We were just on Twitter just angry about it. And this is the result.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Very interesting.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Were people at all reluctant initially because money is such an uncomfortable thing to talk about for so many people?

L. L. McKINNEY: I think they were, it started off slow. It was like a trickle at first rate. And Nita even said that they were scared. But being scared wasn't enough of a reason not to be an ally. Right. And I think once others saw that standing up at this point was a little bit less dangerous because you weren't the first. So they joined in. It was a lot in twenty four hours.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. I saw some really big name authors chimed in like Roxane Gay and Gillian Flynn. It was really amazing.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So for the benefit of our listeners so they published what they got paid, correct? Advance?

L. L. McKINNEY: Yeah, it's about the advance. So #PublishingPaidMe was for those authors to say what they had been paid for their debut. And if they had multiple payments, did they go up? Did they go down, y’know?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

L. L. McKINNEY: In publishing, if a white author has a book that doesn't earn out or it flops, doesn't do well, you know, that book was the problem. Not necessarily the author, not necessarily the type of stories they want to tell.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Right.

L. L. McKINNEY: And they're given a second chance with just as much money, sometimes more money.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Wow .

L. L. McKINNEY: And then you'll have Black authors who might not make back the advance. They might not earn the,. And then you're told, see, see, we told you these stories don't sell. See, we told you Black people don't read. So now, instead of just being this book, it's now about the author and then everybody like the author.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right. So if I'm hearing you right, these disparities in pay trace back to how publishing sees Black stories as not as viable for selling purposes.

L. L. McKINNEY: Advances are a way that a publisher shows what it thinks is and isn't a universal story. That's the excuse that a lot of great authors, just amazing writing have been given is that the book is great, but I just didn't connect to the character. But the thing with it is with storytelling and with empathizing with the character that is kind of a one way street. For my entire life, I have to watch white television shows. I have to watch white movies, read white books. That is how I have to get any kind of entertainment, because that is all that is offered. So I learn from diapers to empathize with white people. I also learned how to empathize with blue dogs, Thomas the trains, cars, all sorts of other things. And that doesn't work the other way around. No one has to has to, for their survival, learn about any other culture. So by the time someone who's never had to empathize, who's never had to consider the aspects of another culture, gets to a point where they're making decisions on books being purchased. The excuse of I didn't connect with the character is a lot more sinister than we first realize, right?

HARVINDER WADHWA: So because publishing is not a regular kind of a nine to five job, it's very different. Is it harder or easier to talk about money?

L. L. McKINNEY: I mean, it's not a "regular" nine to five job, but it's the same. The water cooler is an inbox or the bar at a convention centre or a retreat. But in the same way it still is corporate America. So you are discouraged from talking about money because as a whole we're discouraged from talking about wealth and our lack of it.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Corporate America only talks about money.

L. L. McKINNEY: No, no, no, no, no. They talk about company money.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Right.

L. L. McKINNEY: You're not allowed to talk about personal money. The company can make this much gains and have this much overend or whatever fancy word they want to say for in the black. I don't know. Half of the money is liquid, half of it's solid. Maybe it's a gas. I don't know. I don't like science.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: But you like science fiction.

L. L. McKINNEY: True. And I lied. I do like science, but I don't like math science, OK? But you're discouraged from talking about it for the same reason, you're discouraged talking about it and the corporate world. It's so that you don't find out that you're not being paid your worth. It has very little to do with what somebody else is making. What somebody else is making has absolutely nothing to do with you except to inform you as to whether or not you are being paid your worth.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: OK, so we have established that and we know that things are not fair, things are not right, things are not the way they should be. Where do we go from here?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: If I can go off of that, have you seen ever since #PublishingPaidMe blew up, have you seen any sort of shift in the industry? Has the conversation, do you think, translated into any change?

L. L. McKINNEY: I know it has for a few people. People have contacted me behind the scenes and told them that for lack of a better term, invoking #PublishingPaidMe, led to them getting more than what they were offered initially, much more in some cases. And this is not only for advances, this is people within publishing marginalized people going for promotions or going for jobs or going for whatever. So it has had some change. But if I can count on my fingers the instances, and it's clearly not enough.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Right.

L. L. McKINNEY: The thing about #PublishingPaidMe is that it happened on such a large scale stage that people outside of publishing were made privy to it. The best way a problem lingers is if no one knows it's an issue. If you name a problem, a problem, whether it's a problem for person A or person B, it's now visible and has to be dealt with.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Right, right.

L. L. McKINNEY: If anything, I think it's emboldened to the right people. It needed to embolden, it impacted a few people who it needed to impact. You know, at the higher levels, change is happening and it's happening slowly because the people who are in power are still clinging to things. But it's happening at all because the momentum is on our side.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: To learn more about the pay disparities that Elle spoke to us about, we encourage everyone to look up the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe. It also resulted in a crowdsourced spreadsheet with over 2000 entries where authors shared what they were paid for their book, broken down by race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. And there are similar spreadsheets in many industries, so if you’re wondering if your industry has something like it, take a look!

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HARVINDER WADHWA: This episode we are exploring “How much do you make?” That's a question Anneli has talked a lot about. She's based in Sweden and is a creative director and content writer.

ANNELI: So I went freelance after I finished college, which means, you know, I am setting my own rates. In Sweden, we have like freelance recommendations so that's always a really good way for me to know where to start. But then I feel like I often, like, undersell myself because I don't know any of the content writers, so I don't know what to compare to.

Right now, I'm working as a creative director for a company that I worked with for about a year. So they needed a graphic designer and they asked me to do it. And the pay wasn't the best but, you know, I was like, this is my first time doing this sort of work so it's whatever. And they were like, "oh, the work that you're doing is so great. You're putting so much thought into this. You're so creative, blah, blah, blah." But they kept telling me they were like, "oh, we have this really, like, big budget for a design firm. But now we don't have to use that money because we can hire you instead." To me, that was like, "OK, so why aren't you paying me more? If you're saying that I'm so thoughtful and so creative, like, why am I not getting the money that I should be?" In the creative industry, it's so common to have this mindset that the job in itself is a reward because it's just it's sort of an expression of your passion or it's an expression of your hobby. And, you know, you can be doing what you love, but you can be paid for it, too.

If companies were to sort of start advocating for salary transparency, that makes a huge difference in sort of just normalizing talking about it, if I could see like how much each person in each position is making and why that is if they're saying, "oh, you have to have worked this long to have this pay or you have to have this sort of experience to have this pay", having that sort of ladder to climb, that'd be really helpful.

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HARVINDER WADHWA: So for both Elle and Monica, this question led to some change, but those problems still persist. I want to know where do we go from here to make things better?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I called up an expert who's got some thoughts on that and what role asking this question "How much do you make?" can play in making things better.

RAAFI ALIDINA: My name is Raafi Alidina. I am currently a diversity and inclusion consultant. I was a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School studying implicit gender and racial bias in negotiations. And so a lot of that centres around asking questions like "how much do you make? How much should I make?" and that can get really complicated.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Raafi is also someone who values being really open about this question. He actually has a sort of pact with his friends about it.

RAAFI ALIDINA: When I was graduating from university and was looking for jobs, it was really uncomfortable to ask some of my friends what they were going to be making in the jobs that they had already secured and things like that. And so really early on, a group of friends and I decided that we were explicitly stating that we are OK asking each other that question of how much are you making so that we can negotiate better. You know it was something that everybody told us you have to negotiate and how you negotiate your first salary can determine how you negotiate future salaries and that it's a really important thing to do and things like that.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right. The discomfort you mentioned, do you think it's all about the fact that we weren't raised to talk about money or is there something else going on there as well?

RAAFI ALIDINA: I think it's a combination of things, I think part of it is that discomfort and, you know, we've kind of been conditioned to not talk about money or to be uncomfortable talking about money. You don't ask people how much they make. I think it was like you don't talk about religion, politics and money at the dinner table. That's the line.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, yeah something about that.

RAAFI ALIDINA: I think the other part, though, is we all want to feel like we're earning an adequate amount of money. None of us wants to feel like we're behind our peers. And I think that we've for whatever reason, I think how much people make has been almost portrayed as a thing to compete with people about even your close friends or your family and things like that. It's been like a marker of how successful you are. And people want to feel successful. People don't want to feel bad about themselves.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAAFI ALIDINA: And so if you ask someone how much they make and it turns out they make more than you and they're in a similar job, instead of thinking, "wow, that's great, what did you do to get to that point? How can I do that same thing?" Instead it's "oh, why do I make less money? Am I doing something wrong? Am I doing something differently? Should I have negotiated better in my last one?".

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAAFI ALIDINA: So I think that's part of it, too. And then I think the third aspect is when people ask, “how much do you make?” the immediate thought is what's your salary? It's not what do you make with bonuses? It's not. Is money the only compensation you're getting? And people don't talk about health care benefits. So I work in the US. Just the fact of having more access to health care in Canada means that you don't have to theoretically make as much. So the value of my earnings are less here because I have to pay for some obscene amount of money for health insurance or even things like vacation days, right?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

RAAFI ALIDINA: How much you make can be about a lot more things. And if we thought about it more broadly like that, then maybe we'd be able to negotiate in a more healthy way with our companies and with the people we work with.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: On the flip side, are there any times this question might not be super helpful or does salary transparency in general always lead to these better outcomes for pay equity and inclusion?

RAAFI ALIDINA: Generally speaking, yes, in that the more transparency you have, the more you can understand about how much other people in similar positions make or if you're getting promoted. If you want to justify how much you should make, then you need something to back it up.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAAFI ALIDINA: But one of the other things we know is that people tend to talk to other people who are similar to them. Women talk to other women, men talk to other men, people of colour talk to other people of colour and that's even more true with sensitive questions like this. So when you're talking about “How much do you make?” chances are you're going to ask your family or your closest friends. You're not going to ask random people, most likely. So unless there's a real effort consciously placed on ask people who are different from you how much they make in the similar position.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

RAAFI ALIDINA: It won't necessarily lead to those more equitable outcomes

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Because the knowledge will just be circulating back and forth people who are paid more or less the same?

RAAFI ALIDINA: Right, exactly. And I think that's why it's so important to try normalizing this question. So, like, you and I are very different people in that. I mean, I have no idea how old you are, but we're probably in the similar generation.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAAFI ALIDINA: But otherwise you're a white presenting female person.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAAFI ALIDINA: Living in Canada.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAAFI ALIDINA: I'm a brown guy living in the US. So it's important for us to be able to feel comfortable asking each other these questions.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: On an organizational level, how can you know, because this this is what you do, like, what do you think organizations should do when it comes to the issue of salary transparency?

RAAFI ALIDINA: Ideal world, companies, at least internally, publish everybody's salaries. Everybody knows how much everybody else makes and what I say, how much everybody else makes. I mean, salary, bonus, vacation benefits. I think there are some potential negative sides to that. It can lead to competitions and some level of like gamification of it all.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Ah, right.

RAAFI ALIDINA: I know certainly with my own employers like everyone knows how much everyone makes, it's a thing that we've all said that we need to be able to talk about. And it's still really uncomfortable, even though we've explicitly said it, it's still really uncomfortable to say this is how much I make a year.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Ah, right.

RAAFI ALIDINA: As a person of colour, while I may feel only comfortable talking to other people of colour about how much they make or people who are like me and my closest friend group, I don't have to ask other people. It removes the burden of asking that question, which is really what allows for those kinds of pay equity conversations to begin flourishing in real action, tangible action.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: With your friends with whom you ask this question, has that gotten more comfortable over time or I don't know is it still awkward asking this question with your friends?

RAAFI ALIDINA: It's less awkward than it used to be, but I don't think it's gotten less awkward because we ask it of each other that often or anything like that. I think it's gotten less awkward because we're all more conscious of the fact that how much our salary is isn't a marker of our worth. There's a recognition that we work in different jobs, we work in different fields. We're going to earn different amounts of money. And it's not about how much money we have necessarily, but about whether or not we feel like we're being compensated adequately for what we do. So one of my best friends from university with whom I have this kind of agreement that we're going to be OK asking each other that question. He is a software engineer.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

RAAFI ALIDINA: Software engineers make a lot of money and he's very good at what he does. And so he's been making somewhere between 100,000 USD a year and 150,000 USD a year since we graduated university in 2012.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Damn.

RAAFI ALIDINA: And the way that he always talks about it is I just got lucky that the thing that I enjoy doing happens to pay more right now. And I really appreciate that because in some ways I think he's entirely right. It's not like my job is so much less valuable. It's not like my job is so much less worthwhile doing. It just happens that the thing that I particularly enjoy or want to do is not compensated in the same way. And that's just that's OK. That just is what it is.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

RAAFI ALIDINA: But I can think about am I getting paid adequately relative to what I want in life and also what maybe I feel like I should be earning.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, no that’s I think a smart way to think about it. As we've said, asking about money can be so awkward.

RAAFI ALIDINA: It's a weird thing to ask. I acknowledge that.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: What's your advice for people who want to start this conversation with a coworker?

RAAFI ALIDINA: I think that part of what might help take the awkwardness out of the conversation is to explicitly state, hey, listen, I want to ask you this question so at least people can prepare for it in advance, prepare for the awkwardness, and you can even say, I want to ask you this question because I'm up for promotion. I need to know how much other people in those roles have made in order to negotiate. Well, I'm talking to a lot of people about this so that I can get a good general sense of what this is. So I'm going to ask you this question during our call, just FYI. Providing those reasons can really help people feel more comfortable providing that information. And I'm happy to share all this information with you, too, when you tell me your things, because it's important that we do this together. And I think creating that kind of idea of a collective that this is for all of us, because if it comes out that our company is paying the women less, that's a bad thing.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: For sure.

RAAFI ALIDINA: Even if it doesn't come out, it's still a bad thing for the company. But if it came out, it would be particularly bad, right?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah, for sure.

RAAFI ALIDINA: Or volunteer the information. If people, if you can tell that people feel uncomfortable.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. Because then if they see that you're comfortable, they'll feel more comfortable.

RAAFI ALIDINA: Yeah, I mean it's just it's the same thing with vulnerability.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

RAAFI ALIDINA: To be vulnerable. Someone needs to take that first step so that the other person can feel like they can reciprocate. Yeah. And if you're in a position of privilege or power, it's even more important for you to do that first step.

[Music]

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Fun point about that last interview, Raafi at the end of it, once we had wrapped, actually asked me and our producer Sabrina, how much we make, and he shared how much he makes.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Really.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So I thought that was cool, that he was practicing what he was preaching.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Yeah. So Elena, don't expect me to tell you my salary, and I'm not even going to ask you about your salary.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Oh okay.

HARVINDER WADHWA: I am still very reluctant, even if I was allowed to. I'm reluctant to share my salary or more importantly, ask anybody about their salary.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: What's got that still feeling uncomfortable?

HARVINDER WADHWA: I don't know, but that is the way I feel. This is definitely that transparency, I agree with you that there should be transparency so that everybody knows where the range is and within that range they can compare with their fellow coworkers. Some person making 10 per cent more or less than you. That is fair simply because there are no two people who have the exact same productivity and that needs to be taken into account. But then somebody making half as you for the same job, that is totally unfair.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I think maybe what we learned throughout this episode is that we're moving towards a more transparent society and more transparent workplaces, but we aren't there yet. The discomfort is still very real and palpable and we haven't maybe done all that work as a society needed to make this question, you know, seem really normal and make talking about money seem really comfortable.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Absolutely.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I think in the right context, if someone comes to me and this knowledge will benefit them, I'm going to try to be more open with sharing this information, even though it might be hard.

HARVINDER WADHWA: All the power to you, Elena.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Harv's like your funeral.

[Theme]

HARVINDER WADHWA: I'm Harvinder Wadhwa.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: And I'm Elena Hudgins Lyle.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Thanks for getting inappropriate for us.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Big thanks to our guests Monica, L.L. McKinney and Raafi Alidina. You also heard voice notes from Kadrah and Anneli.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Every episode has an accompanying webcomic, and this week it was illustrated by Kasia Babis, you can find it on Instagram @IQ_Podcast. Also, make sure to visit cbc.ca/iqpodcast for a full transcript of this episode.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: The socially distant squad behind this podcast are Sabrina Bertsch, Cindy Long and myself. The show is mixed by Andrew Norton. Sarah Melton is our chase producer and our digital producer is Judy Ziyi Gu. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner and our executive producer is Arif Noorani.

[Theme out]

HARVINDER WADHWA: An inappropriate question is like thinking someone can hack your bank account from Googling your salary,

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: The tea is so strong, I love it.

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Transcript: Inappropriate Questions Season 3 Episode 4

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