In our series Salary Stories, women with long-term career experience open up about the most intimate details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiating, raises, promotions and job loss, with the hope it will give young people more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and maybe take a few risks along the way.
Been in the workforce for at least five years and interested in contributing your salary story? Submit your information here.
Age: 34
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Current industry and job title: Marketing, business development director
Current salary: $180,000/year plus commission bonus (typically $20,000+, depending on performance)
Number of years employed since school or university: 13
Starting salary: $25,000/year
Biggest salary jump: From $120,000 to $170,000 due to a job switch to a bigger, more established company in late 2020.
Biggest salary drop: My company laid off about half of its staff early in the 2020 pandemic, and everyone remaining took a 20% pay cut for about six months. I went from $120,000 to $96,000. It sucked — I was working twice as much to cover the staffing gaps for less money.
Biggest negotiation regret: My first agency was pretty notorious for paying its more junior staff way less than competitors. After my first year, I was identified as a high performer, so I researched what competitors were paying and went into a meeting with my SVP to make a case to get a match, or at least get closer to that number. She told me (and I wish I were making this up!) that every dollar I asked for would need to get taken out of my teammates’ salaries. Looking back on it, this makes me furious. Not only was this obviously untrue (and took advantage of my inexperience in the industry), I later learned that my male colleagues were making $10,000 to $15,000 more than me for the same role. It’s mind-boggling that a female leader would continue to perpetuate this cycle.
Best salary advice: Always negotiate, even if it’s for something as small as $2,000. It will not make any difference to a company, but it will make a huge difference in your life. Plus, negotiating immediately sets an equal power balance with you and your company. When negotiating, say your number and shut up! Sometimes I struggle with feeling “greedy” when I negotiate: I have everything I need — why am I haggling? To counter this I make a list of who else will benefit from that increased salary (donations to Planned Parenthood, gifts for friends and family) and keep it on a Post-it stuck to my computer monitor to keep my focus clear while negotiating.
My responsibilities included managing inventory when it arrived in a shipment (my favorite, because I could just throw on music and prep like 100 garments for the floor), selling and checkout on the sales floor, and reconciling registers at the end of the night (my least favorite, because if you were one cent off you could be there for 45 minutes figuring out where the math wasn’t mathing).
I got the receptionist job through a temp agency, it included answering the main phone, file organization, and generally just being a body to make sure that nothing weird happened in the lobby. It was incredibly boring.
I got a full-time offer at the magazine a few months into my internship, which allowed me to give up the nanny gig and weekday restaurant shifts, with no change to my total salary. I went from a more editorial-focused role (running around the city picking up clothes and items for shoots, writing and scheduling pieces for the website) to running their marketing and events team in my full time job.
My responsibilities here were very similar to my role as an account manager. I managed creatives, designers, and strategists, and activation professionals to execute large-scale events. I was often the lead client-facing representative of my company, managing tricky situations and conflicts.
Next, I hope to be a managing director at a smaller agency — I love the culture of smaller teams and not feeling distance from the work itself. I’m hoping to earn $250,000 total.
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