Happy International Women’s Day! 🚺
Around my company at the moment we’ve been talking a lot about the gender pay gap, more female software engineers and salary and levelling transparency. I am in all the conversations. I am right there asking the questions of leadership with all the other individual contr-
Oh wait. 🤦♀️
I am leadership now too.
I am…
The Man.
Well not literally. But I am part of the problem now. I am part of the power
structure that is helping to creating an opaque information vaccum around
diversity targets and compensation bands.
Recently I went through annual compensation planning as a manager for the first time. It was a peek behind the curtain; a look into how the sausage was made for annual salary reviews. It was eye opening, and what struck me was how much everyone cared about making everything as fair and equitable as possible with the budget we had. I saw no evil moustache twirling, no frugality or bias towards underrepresented minorities.
This was the first time I had ever been excited to do maths and make spreadsheets because it allowed us to be as objective as humanly possible. I left feeling accomplished and proud of what we had done.
When asked about the process by engineers I felt panicked 😳. Was I allowed to tell people how we calculated the numbers? Was I allowed to share salary bands and other information? Was that secret EM-only business?
I had only gotten this role recently, would I be thrown out into the wastes where all the EMs who didn’t follow the rules lie? ⚰️
But then again, all this information shouldn’t be secret. As an IC, I hated not knowing how all this stuff happened behind closed doors. Now I have an opportunity to be as authentic and transparent as I can be.
So why shouldn’t I? I’ll probably keep going till someone tells me to stop 🙈.
– Milly Rowett