Our Salary Paths series aims to give fellow Elphas a reference point for salary negotiations and encourage more women to talk about compensation. We hope that opening up the conversation will contribute to more pay transparency and equitable pay.
Interested in sharing your Salary Path with us? Please fill out this form here and we will get back to you (can be posted anonymously, too! 😉 ).
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My First Job: Collecting brains around the UK
My salary journey began in London, not far from the historic halls of University College London where I completed my PhD in neuroscience. After a short stint as a student researcher, I moved to London (from sunny Portugal) in 2012.
Starting as a research technician at a University’s Brain bank, my initial salary (£28,000 per year + overtime, around £500 per year, I think!) was higher than a lot of my peers who were working in healthcare and provided a crucial foundation in a high-cost city.
A start in Academia
I had always known that I wanted to be a PhD - I had always been very academic and wanted to discover new and exciting things. After almost one year of applying for PhDs, I got an offer and took a salary cut to pursue a PhD in 2013 - I was getting paid £17,500 per year - which was impossible to live off.
Bear in mind, this was quite mid-range for PhDs in the UK. This salary was, however, tax-free and I took on some event management jobs on the weekends, which supplemented my income by around £100-300 per month.
Transition to clinical research
By 2017, with my PhD funding depleted and my thesis pending, I ventured into clinical research without much thinking. My PhD funding (and salary!) ran out in 2017 and I scrambled to find a part-time role that would suit my schedule. This is when I found clinical research and I took my first role as a Data Manager.
Guess what? I LOVED IT! I was back at £28,000 per year (pro rata, 4 days a week) and then went up to full-time. I had a couple of salary increments (around £30,000 per year by late 2018).
I got fed up with the lack of progression at my workplace and started looking around. I was quickly offered a role as a Research Associate at a medical software company and my salary was bumped to £45,000 per year in early 2019.
Even though I had a great relationship with my colleagues, my skillset was not being used and the project had huge delays due to medical data protection logistics.
I loved clinical research and wanted to be in the field of psychiatry and neuroscience, the field of my PhD. I transitioned to another university, #2 in the world for psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, as a Project Manager and Senior Researcher in 2019. This role, unfortunately, only matched my previous salary (£45,000 per year, then slowly moving up to £47,000 per year) and also expanded my responsibilities substantially. I led major mental health research projects, was super proactive and got involved in a bunch of additional projects.
In 2023, I realised that I was not going to be able to pursue the research projects I was interested in and that the more senior I got, the more grant applications and oversight I had to do. As my level of seniority increased over the 4 years I was in that role and I constantly surpassed the goals of my yearly reviews, I was met with a “we can’t give you a raise”.
In late 2020 I also started working for a digital mental health platform as a writer, editor, and podcast co-host. In 2022, I started getting paid £150 per output (blog or podcast) which supplemented my income. However, this came to a halt in 2023 due to funding cuts, and I went back to being an (unpaid) volunteer again.
I grew frustrated with my stunted compensation, especially as I took on more responsibilities. I also saw some major cracks in academia that I had ignored until then, and that is when I decided to leap into health tech.
The health tech horizon
In 2020, dissatisfaction with academic constraints led me to health tech. My first role was as a Scientific Advisor, I was being paid around £69,000 per year (I was paid in dollars). I had to negotiate the salary from around £48,000 per year to £69,000 per year as that was in line with the salary of a senior postdoc in academia (I had an ex-academic in the company fighting my corner!).
Again, I loved working with the team, but as the start-up pivoted, my skills and experience became less and less relevant. After 6 months, I was graciously laid off (hey, I still have a great relationship with everyone there!).
As I moved out of a full-time role into a consultancy in Health Tech (the obvious thing to do for me!), determining my hourly rate was a new challenge. I was not sure how to price my expertise (hello imposter syndrome!) but I quickly realised that the pricing that is practised in the US does not translate to the UK - the budgets are simply smaller! Whilst in the US around $300/h was a mid-range rate, in the UK I am more likely to agree on a fee of around £60/h (around $75/h).
Consultancy and teaching
Job prospects in Health Tech were looking bleak for scientists/researchers in 2023, especially if you were not US-based. So, I panicked, and in late 2023, I took on some teaching/lecturing back at the last university I worked at.
I have been teaching Neuroscience and Mental Health MSc students and I get paid the equivalent of £54,000 per year. I get a new contract every couple of months and the number of students (the pay depends on this) is not guaranteed. The role has a lot of mentoring and I get to learn so much as I teach - plus, the workload ebbs and flows which allows me to fit in freelance consulting work in Health Tech.
Lessons from a toxic job
Recently, as I was trying to build my consultancy business and was struggling to secure steady clients, I decided to answer a recruiter’s message on LinkedIn - I thought maybe a full-time role would be a good idea.
I am writing about this because I want to also show my “failure” when things didn’t work out spectacularly. I had a brief stint at an extremely toxic company where I fought for my salary but took a lower starting salary than I wanted.
I was told that the company would match the £75,000 per year salary that I had asked for - the role involved setting up a new department and delivering a lot, in a very short timeframe. The company ended up, after a couple of strange weeks of negotiating, mediated by the recruiter, offering me £60,000 for the first 6 months, raising to £70,000 after probation.
I felt that the recruiter and the company were never fully transparent with me and did not value my skills - it ended up being the most bizarre place I have ever worked at and I handed in my resignation within 2 months of starting. I had a colleague who started a few weeks earlier, on a brief consulting project alongside me at the same company who warned about the dysfunctional culture and I shortly found out that there was a lot of turnover, especially for new starters. This experience taught me to really trust my gut in the recruitment stage!
