Lily Konings is a digital product designer with an impressive resume. However, her career wasn’t without its challenges.
Recently, Konings turned to Twitter to share what she went through when she moved to the tech hub, San Francisco. More specifically, how she ended up with a $30K smaller pay than her peers.
Lily’s honest tweets immediately went viral, sparking a discussion on unequal pay and ways to eradicate it. Here’s how it went down.
A few days ago, digital product designer Lily Konings tweeted about her experience with unequal pay
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Lily touches on an important point. Generally, women and minorities ask for – and are offered – lower salaries than white men; this problem is called the ‘ask gap.’
In many fields, men expect higher salaries than women with comparable qualifications. For example, a study of online jobseekers in Argentina found that women ask for 6% less on average. This gap increases in male-dominated occupations — another study that took a look at US doctors in residency showed that women’s ideal starting salary averaged 92% of men’s ideal.
Some people disagree with Lily’s arguments
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While these numbers might not seem that worrying at first, keep in mind that pay gaps at the start of a career compound.
“Over time it builds up because the percentage of raises is usually based on the base salary, so that accumulates over the years,” Zhaleh Semnani-Azad, a management professor at California State University, Northridge, told the BBC. “So, this is where women do miss out long term.” Some researchers have estimated that a difference of $1,000 in starting salary could lead to a cumulative loss of a half-million dollars.”
And some support her line of reasoning
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