Pay gap: Will Gen Z salary-sharing on TikTok make a difference?

Gen Z is known for sharing everything about their lives - from their outfits to their latest meals - online. Now, they're sharing their salaries, defying a long-held taboo and ruffling employers' feathers in the process.

Anyone who runs into Hannah Williams on the street can expect to be asked a rather probing question: "What do you do and how much do you make?"

Ms Williams, 25, is the founder of Salary Transparent Street - a TikTok account with over 850,000 followers and 16.7m likes. In her videos, she travels to different US cities and asks people on the street to stop and share their profession and salary.

Ms Williams said she started these videos because of her own career experience, when she realised she was being underpaid. After that, she began discussing her career journey on TikTok, where she said her followers really responded to her openness about salary.

"This isn't a thing that people talk about, but it should be. This should be normal and the more I learned about the gender pay gap and race pay gaps I was like, 'this has to be a thing' - and my response to that was to create Salary Transparent Street," she said.

She's not the only one asking these questions. Younger generations are pushing for pay transparency - the practice of openly sharing salary with others - with viral tweets, memes and TikTok accounts.

Some lawmakers are taking heed. On Tuesday, California became the latest US state to require all employers with more than 15 staff to post a salary range for open positions, and for the state to track data on how salaries differ according to race, gender and ethnicity. Gen Z TikTokers, who had supported the law, cheered.

Other states and cities have passed similar laws. While some employers have resisted salary disclosure in the past, experts say the tide is turning.

Talking salary has long been seen as uncouth in the US. Dr Ricardo Perez-Truglia, assistant professor at the University of California Berkeley, said it's somewhat equivalent to discussing self-worth.

"On average, salaries tend to be a signal of how valuable you are to employers. So it's not surprising that some people feel uncomfortable talking about their salaries, just like they may feel uncomfortable talking about their grades in school," he said.

Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at Glassdoor, a website that hosts company reviews and salary estimates for professions, agreed. It can be a "deep source of anxiety", he said - no-one wants to be an outlier if they're overpaid or underpaid, and fear of finding oneself there discourages willingness to share.

But there is plenty of evidence that younger generations are more comfortable sharing personal information online. That includes salary, surveys suggest.

"As with most social movements, it's the younger generations as always, that are leading the way," said Maria Colacurcio, CEO of Syndio, a platform that conducts pay equity analysis.

Over 80% of Gen Z feels that sharing salary will improve pay equality, according to LinkedIn Market Research. Millennials are not far behind, with 75% agreeing. With each older generation, that sentiment diminishes - 47% of Gen X agrees and only 28% of Baby Boomers agree.

Ms Williams's experience has been in line with that research, she said: Gen Zers and Millennials are much more likely to say yes to her when she approaches them to share their pay on video, and women more often agree than men.

Some people, including Ms Williams, believe that pay transparency will help close gender and racial pay gaps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women earn 82 cents to every dollar a man earns - with women of colour often earning even less.

When travel writer Victoria Walker decided to leave her job, she disclosed how much she made on Twitter while sharing a job posting for her replacement.

She did it to put power back in employees' hands, she said.

"There's a lot of mystique around being a travel writer" and "there isn't much transparency in our own newsrooms about pay", she said.

Some studies on real-world examples have suggested that when salaries are disclosed, gender pay gaps shrink.

In 2006, Denmark started requiring firms to publish gender pay gaps - a recent survey found that the gender pay gap declined by 2%. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that the gender pay gap decreased 20-40% when public sector university salary disclosure laws came into effect in Canada.

According to Mr Terrazas, when pay is opaque it's hard to decipher whether it was based on something acceptable - like relevant experience in a labour market - or whether it was based on something generally considered to be discriminatory - like race or gender in the labour market.

There could be potential downsides, experts caution. The Harvard Business Review warns of some pitfalls to avoid, like "pay compression", meaning new hires could earn the same pay as long-tenured employees.

Although the right for employees to discuss pay amongst each other has been enshrined in a national law for 90 years, some US employees report pressure not to talk about the subject.

A 2022 Glassdoor-Harris Poll survey revealed 28% of employees say their employer discourages them from discussing pay with colleagues.

Just last year Apple shut down a Slack channel where employees were discussing salary. According to Apple, this channel did not meet their Slack terms of use.

When Colorado enacted its pay transparency law, in January 2021, some remote-work employers tried to skirt the law by opening up jobs to everyone except Coloradoans. This was so rampant that one Colorado resident created a website of all the companies excluding Colorado applicants.

But the more states pass similar legislation, the harder it will be for employers to avoid the hard discussions about salaries. California, the most populous state and the home of tech giants like Apple and Meta, will have its pay transparency law go into effect next year.

That will have a widespread impact, said Ms Colacurcio.

"We can't get away with anymore saying this job is open to all remote employees except Colorado," she said. "And so now with California, companies are saying, all right, we got to comply with this."

As for Ms Williams, the TikToker, her salary disclosure sparked her own career renaissance.

She quit her job as a senior data analyst - making $115,000 (£106,000) - to pursue full-time content creation for Salary Transparent Street. She is on track to make $150,000 this year.