There is a rumor at my school that our economics teacher, Herr Bergman, makes 52,000 kronor a month. The rumor is nine months old. The rumor has been fact-checked by the girls in my class approximately forty times. The boys do not know the rumor. This is not because we haven't told them. It is because they have not asked.
A thing has happened in my grade over the last two years, and it has happened almost entirely between the girls. We share numbers. We compare summer job wages. We tell each other what our mothers make. We have started, gently, to ask what our fathers make. The boys, meanwhile, have kept a truly impressive silence about all of it.
Secrecy is a habit that only benefits the person who set the price.
Secrecy is a habit that only benefits the person who set the price.
My older sister is twenty-three and works at a consultancy. She told me, over Christmas, that in her first month she compared salaries with the three women at her level and learned that she was making eleven percent less than one of them. She asked. She got the raise. This is the story she tells at family dinners now. It is, I think, my favorite story.
My generation of Swedish girls is going to be the first that walks into every negotiation already knowing the number. Not because we are brave. Because we told each other.
The girls are talking. Get in the conversation.