When the Boss Says, 'Don't Tell Your Coworkers How Much You Get Paid'

"Specifically, variables have been developed to represent career interruption among workers with specific gender, age, and number of children. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.1 and 76.4 of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent."

My personal opinion is that there may be a slight gap, research that conservatively accounts for factors rather than assuming the difference is 100% gender-pay do tend to put it below 10%, however there just isn't enough hard evidence to account for all the variables which may cause such a gap, so finding an accurate value isn't possible. Each side of the debate will always find the most attractive figures to support their agenda, as can be seen by people quoting 20%+ raw wage gap analysis that doesn't account for difference in time worked etc, and others misreading statistics to say that it's lower than reported.

-------------------------- [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga...

[2] http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20...

I started out in a very small but rapidly expanding software company, where the founders encouraged everyone (including themselves) to be very open about salaries. This didn't work too badly because most employees were recent graduates and no-one was earning much money. However it did generate some dischord when it became apparent that those from less prestigious universities were getting paid slightly less.

A few years later I was working in a very large corporation, where (like you), HR hadn't secured their data very well, and I got to see details of many thousands of salaries and bonuses, including those of some of the highest paid people in the UK at the time. Without going into too much detail, the remuneration disparities were staggering. I think it is fair to say that it was the sort of company that was prepared to pay as much as necessary and as little as possible. If the scale of inconsistencies were widely known, I would imagine it would have created a fairly toxic working environment.

So in the end it might come down to company size and culture. I can't imagine why a small coffee shop, like in the original article, would want to keep it so secret though.

Soon after I got my first job out of college my employer told me it was "not a good idea to talk about your compensation" with my co-workers. You know how they say "consider the source" when you get information? Why would my employer not want me to share my compensation with my co-workers? _Because it benefits them_ if their workforce is oblivious about who is getting paid what. Make no mistake: sharing compensation information freely among your colleagues is, to most employers, the thin edge of a long wedge towards organized labor.

Personally, I would do it more often if people weren't so freaked out about it. So the bosses have waged a good campaign: it's a social norm.

Don't generalize. The EU has 28 member states, with diverse cultures and social norms. What works in Norway may not work in the southern Italy.