You Earn Less Than a Peer. Now What? --- Thanks to new rules surrounding salary transparency, you can harness the conversation to raise your earnings

"Your co-worker makes how much?

Years ago, our salary number was a secret. Now, as open-pay laws ripple across the country, younger workers pipe up on TikTok and employee groups crowdsource salary data, many people are learning how their pay stacks up. Sometimes it feels like a heart attack.

"I nearly fell off the couch," Lisa Dwyer says about the day she scrolled through fellow marketing professionals' self-reported salaries, bonuses and equity awards in an anonymized spreadsheet started by an industry organization she had joined. She stared at the document, stacked with compensation packages far higher than hers, and thought, "OK, my pay is clearly wrong."

What should you do if you learn you make less than your peers, or find that your salary sits at the bottom of the range your company is posting on job listings? Can you use the information to win a raise, without risking your career? And how do you know if you're truly underpaid?

"The more you know, the stronger your negotiating position is," says Kathryn Valentine, the founder of Worthmore Strategies, an Atlanta-based consulting firm focused on boosting women's negotiation skills. To get a sense of how your pay compares, she recommends asking former colleagues, mentors and industry peers what they think you're worth.

Mention that you're going into a negotiation and thinking of asking for ... here, toss out a number that feels a bit on the high side. Then say, "What do you think?"

"Seventy percent of the time the person will just straight up tell me what they're making," Ms. Valentine says.

Also try recruiters, who can tell you what candidates for similar roles are being offered. When you approach your boss, don't mention that you heard Sally or Jim makes more than you. Instead, outline your past performance -- "I hit all my targets last quarter" -- and your future vision -- "I'm on track for the same strong performance this year." Note that you were surprised to find that the market rate for your role is 25% more than you're currently making.

Next, Ms. Valentine recommends asking, "Can you talk to me about how we can help close that gap?"

"And then stop talking," she adds. Trailing on just weakens your position.

Ms. Dwyer, the marketer, wanted to be sure that her industry spreadsheet reflected reality. She called around to executives she knew, who confirmed that her field, cybersecurity, was indeed paying at elevated levels. When she came up for a promotion, she sent the head of her company the spreadsheet and suggested he take a look before they chatted further about compensation. He came back with a hefty raise, she says.

She attributes her success to being direct, emotionless and armed with data. "It gave me a voice," she says of the spreadsheet.

New laws requiring companies to divulge pay ranges on job advertisements recently went into effect in New York City and Colorado, and are set to roll out in Washington state and California in January. Some bosses are being bombarded with questions about pay ranges and salary adjustments, says Christine Hendrickson, who as vice president of strategic initiatives for pay-equity software provider Syndio helps employers analyze how they pay employees. The conversation has trickled down to jurisdictions not covered by such rules too, she says.

Meanwhile, pay disparities between veteran employees and new hires have grown in organizations that had to shell out for hires in a tight labor market, heightening concerns about fairness.

"If companies won't talk, then we will," says Hannah Williams, a former data analyst whose TikTok video detailing her salary history went viral in February. In April, the 25-year-old launched Salary Transparent Street, where she conducts vox-populi interviews asking people what they do and how much they earn.

The initial videos attracted so many views that Ms. Williams and her fiance, who live in Alexandria, Va., quit their day jobs to work on the project full time. (She says that it's hard to calculate her current pay, but that the pair signed a nearly half-million-dollar contract with job board Indeed in September to produce branded content.)

Ms. Williams acknowledges her question is still taboo for many. Some people she approaches -- especially older ones, she says -- are confused or taken aback.

"They're, like, what do you want, my Social Security number next?" she says.

Legally, most workers have the right to talk about salary, thanks to protections from various federal and state rules, says Ms. Hendrickson, a lawyer. That doesn't mean people who disclose their pay won't face backlash from resentful colleagues or offended bosses.

Workers who openly point to a colleague who makes more risk being labeled difficult, says David Buckmaster, who oversees compensation and benefits at mobile-game developer Wildlife Studios and wrote a book about corporate compensation.

Mr. Buckmaster recommends raising the issue if the pay difference is substantial -- at least 15% -- or if multiple members of your team are outearning you, leaving you the clear outlier. Try to distill your case to one captivating sentence your manager can sell to higher-level bosses.

Sometimes, you'll find your value elsewhere. When a new colleague with little experience blurted out his pay to Amanda Borchert, the clinical research coordinator was upset to realize she made $7.50 less an hour. But Ms. Borchert, of Rapid City, S.D., feared that talking about others' pay could backfire.

She started looking for other jobs. Within a few months, she had accepted a new position that paid her three times as much.

She's so happy with her work and her pay now that she says she has no desire to talk about it." [1]

1. Work & Life: You Earn Less Than a Peer. Now What? --- Thanks to new rules surrounding salary transparency, you can harness the conversation to raise your earnings
Feintzeig, Rachel. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 05 Dec 2022: A.11.