salary-database

cadran·Dec 08, 2021

Posted in:Announcements Job Hunting Money

Hi Elpha,

We’re really excited to share that our Transparent Salary Database is now live! 💰

It includes thousands of real salaries from fellow Elphas, submitted anonymously over the last month. You can explore and filter by job title, years of experience, company size, location, race/ethnicity, and lots more.

This database is possible thanks to anonymous submissions from all of you and will be updated regularly. Our hope is that it can help you benchmark your pay and if desired, negotiate for more!

If you find this helpful, please share the database with women you know in your ERG and Slack groups. The more data we collect, the more helpful the database can be. 🙏

We’ll also have a full report diving into the insights from this data coming early 2022 - stay tuned!

What do you think about salary databases and pay transparency?

Isabelle147·Dec 08, 2021

i think this would be more helpful if we included RSUs. that's a large portion of a lot of people's TC.

cadran·Dec 08, 2021

Thanks for the feedback! Right now, we have a free text field for equity based comp. We haven't shared it in order to avoid identifying info, but we've updated the table to indicate whether someone's offer did or did not include equity. Since early stage startups also use options grants, it gets a bit trickier to place a value on those options.

cadran·Dec 09, 2021

hi! we gave this more thought and have updated the table to include the free text equity that was entered in the equity compensation field. We have stripped identifying info.

madien·Dec 08, 2021

This is a fantastic resource!! Thank you for creating and thank you all who entered their information. Personally, being an independent consultant, this is not super relevant to me, but this tells me how much womxn benefit from a community like Elpha! Keep it up, Elphans.I am also serving on the BoD of a local nonprofit, which is a trade association and my revenue responsibility is for their job portal (among other things). Over the last year I have been trying to bring more transparency in job postings and striving to make the resource more equitable, and as a part of this effort, I have had several conversations with my board and our constituents. It's clear that not disclosing the salary information only serves to perpetuate the employers' interests and systemic discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. I was curious to review the salary DB from that angle too and much of what I see is in-line with the prevalent practice --- PoC's are paid lower than SW cis-gendered people. I would encourage that the next step for Elpha is to recommend sharing salary ranges on job postings. I do understand that this is easier said than done because it is seldom one woman's call - she has to be supported by her employer. However, one can at least try.

cadran·Dec 08, 2021

Thanks for the thoughts, Medha. We're publishing a report in the coming months based on this data + more that we collected. Stay tuned.And yes, encouraging companies to share salary bands for open roles is on our radar. Hope to have more on this in the not too distant future.

jikajika·Dec 08, 2021

This is the greatest gift of the year!I stumbled across last years list, about 2 months ago, and me-oh-my did it open my eyes & make me get my 💩together. It's because of that list that gave me the benchmark of my salary (beyond glassdoor & salary.com) AND what type of companies I should be applying for (that's REALLY important). When I was looking at job positions, I didn't have the "audacity" to go over a certain amount - with me thinking "no one would pay me THAT much". After seeing last years list, I started bumping Rihanna's "B***h Better Have My Money", going into EV-ERY interview. So much so that I got hired within my new & improved range. Damn right...This list is HUGE. GAME CHANGING.And I will never doubt again.Thank you! 🙏🏾

Tosha15·Dec 09, 2021

Cosigned!! Down to the same pump-up jam 🤑🎶 It's been SO helpful to see benchmarks. I doubled my salary in a new role, and realizing that such a jump wasn't unreasonable was mind blowing!

jikajika·Dec 09, 2021

GET👏🏾YO👏🏾BAG👏🏾SQUIRREL👏🏾Yassssss!!!! Once you SEE IT, there's no unseeing it - BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

coflaherty·Dec 08, 2021

That's so inspiring! Great job on knowing your worth and going for it.

jikajika·Dec 08, 2021

I'm looking at some of these salaries & bonuses - and I'm wondering how they negotiated a $15K bonus? Could we add a section, next year, where we can choose/highlight someone's submission and ask questions? To stay anonymous, they could respond to you & you guys make it into an article or a guide that goes into the Resources tab.#thinkingoutloud

JuliaXu·Dec 14, 2021

Companies will sometimes also pay large signing bonuses if accepting their offer means you're leaving your existing employer before your usual bonus would hit, so they make you whole on that. That and the relocation bonus jjYu mentioned as well.

jikajika·Dec 15, 2021

The more you KNOW!🙌🏾

jjY·Dec 14, 2021

+1 to the option where others can ask questions to their submission!My initial guess is that relocation costs may have been baked into the signing bonus or the company tacked on more money to stay competitive with other offers. Would love to find out the actual answer though

coflaherty·Dec 08, 2021

The power of women working together to empower each other! 💯👏 Thank you for sharing this fantastic resource.

Adina5·Dec 09, 2021

Just wanted to note here that I can't recommend enough that everyone try to compile this information within their own companies if your employer doesn't offer any kind of pay transparency. (Pay transparency can even just mean: what are the guidelines around how pay and raises and bonuses are determined.)Start an anonymous (or not anonymous!) spreadsheet, create an Airtable and invite people, or just talk about it when you go out to lunch with your coworkers. You'll likely find all kinds of inequity and just pure randomness going on. The only people who benefit from teams not sharing their salaries with each other are employers. If you're embarrassed that you make too little to share with your coworkers, remember that that's just what someone decided to pay you. It's not your actual value! And your coworkers can't help you advocate if they don't know you're underpaid. I have only ever seen support from higher earners for lower earners on teams. And if you're embarrassed that you make too much to tell your coworkers and they'll resent you, remember it's not your fault what someone decided to pay you either! And information about high salaries is the best gift for coworkers making lower salaries - they'll know where the real ceiling is and they'll know what to ask for when they negotiate. You can help get people up to your level by telling people what that level is. And as someone the organization values, you can help advocate for your coworkers by letting your management know that you know about the pay disparities and it concerns you. Knowing that dissatisfaction with salaries is coming from higher and lower earners can really help management move things along. TL:DR: normalize talking to coworkers about how much you all make.

Gwenn83·Dec 09, 2021

You're right to fact find within your organization because that's the best reference point on the bounds on compensation as if you go outside the firm you need to factor in amount of money raised, cash vs. equity framework differences, and culture differences to have a fair comparison. It's the best way to build a solid "comp."That said, I think something that is lost on many people around pay equality is that all employees, even in the same role, don't produce the same value to an enterprise. If Sally is making $100K and Susan is making $80K as operations analysts, the difference alone is not always a problem but it can be. From an owner perspective, look, perhaps Sally codes faster, aligns expectation and reality better so there's not communication missteps and work is completed on time or ahead of deadline, etc. there's a lot of ways there's "different" value that's less apparent. Again, not saying all the guys bring more value (because they don't) but I think when you negotiate, you should think about all the ways you add value beyond sheer output and how that helps the firm. These are far more compelling arguments that boost your changes of success—if they are true and apparent—vs. well they make more than me for the same title. There's people everywhere that play above and below their titles everywhere.

Adina5·Dec 09, 2021

Totally agree! There are lots of reasons why two people in the same role might make different amounts. And that's why pay transparency is so important. If someone is making 25% less than they could be, they should know that, and they should know why. And there should be a clear path to someone eventually getting that 25% raise by meeting some standardized expectations. This not only helps employees make more money, it helps organizations see higher performance.And talking about our salaries with our coworkers is a great way to find out if there's a pay disparity (for whatever reason, even a legitimate one) and to raise it to management about overcoming that disparity. There should be objective measures of success and competency, not just managers' feelings about who is doing a better job, which we know introduces bias. We're often told by management about salaries that "it's complicated" or "there are more factors." Compensation is complicated, and there are a lot of factors. But employees deserve to know what those factors are and to be able to confirm their compensation lines up with real policies and not bias or randomness. That's transparency. Talking to each other is just the first step. The next step is to then work together as a team to talk to management about transparent, equitable compensation structures, and to do that, we need to be informed, and we need to be working together.

Gwenn83·Dec 09, 2021

I wrote much much longer thoughts in this related thread on "compensation philosophy" but we're mostly aligned: https://elpha.com/posts/vefnq03p/compensation-philosophy-for-first-hiresAgreed on "it's complicated" or "there are more factors" being insufficient in most cases. There are cases where that is absolutely the right call: someone's partner lost a job, someone has a miscarriage (productivity is expected to be down), etc. and without that employee's desire to share those details broadly they should remain private and "there's more to it" is absolutely appropriate. The problem, typically is, leadership doesn't have a clear and established compensation "philosophy"—I wrote longer commentary on this in the other thread but my top line for leadership is: don't expect anyone to understand what you cannot explain. You need to be principled in how your "philosophy" works in practice and explain that in the joining process so everyone's on the same page.A simple one is "do we negotiate with terrorists or not" with respect to what happens when people leverage external offers? You should know (i) 99% of the time we don't because we believe X but for the best of the best maybe we'll break it or structure other value outside of comp OR (ii) we handle it case by case for everyone...if it's (i) then you should be able to say in the joining process: "if you are unsatisfied with your compensation and seek outside opportunities, plan to take them because we don't level candidates up and that's not aligned with our compensation philosophy." I believe pay transparency but you can only make transparent what is a thoughtful framework and I honestly don't think most startups have done that work. And for those that do, what's in place came from someone/someplace else without much adoption for their values—which is why a lot of founders' purported values don't match their firm internal dynamics.The only place I would disagree is on "standardized expectations" as a lot of the top top performers are don't things that cannot be "standardized" or most people are unwilling to do. Being exceptional in your job requires enjoying it enough to think about it outside of the firm / have an owner's mindset so to speak. So someone's 25% might be because they're always coming up with new ideas on top of their workload that may enhance the teams sales strategy and creates new distribution opportunities, improve operations (why does this firm run like this, we need to update our policies so things move more streamlined, etc.), etc. If you don't care enough to have owner's mindset, you'll likely never be the most well paid in a company. This may be a "bias" by one definition but also it's not because historical actions predict future behavior so a leader can expect that same person will continue that above and beyond nature (and produce more and more value with more "free rein thinking"

MarinelaRoque·Dec 10, 2021

Thank you for this incredible resource!Adding some feedback as well in a similar alignment to a few of the existing comments posted. A sense of the role descriptions would be useful as well (in the future) since the accountabilities and responsibilities of any individual may vary significantly across companies / industries / sectors even among those with the same job title.

NicAmos·Dec 11, 2021

This is inspirational because I’m dreaming of a salary of $250k and then I see women receiving $500, $600 and $1MM base

jessicaking·Dec 17, 2021

It’s all about looking at what people currently in those positions require/have in terms of experience, qualifications and skills, then hammering away at achieving those things. Focus on that and you’ll be fine.

carliemakler·Dec 16, 2021

How do we add to the database?

LaniAssaf·Jan 10, 2022

Hi Carlie! You can add yours here: https://elpha.com/salary-database (click "add your salary") on the table.

Membrilla·Feb 09, 2022

Hi Lani, I had added my salary, but I changed jobs and would like to update or add again and can't find how. Am I missing something? Can't find the "add your salary" option. Thanks!

kellster·Dec 17, 2021

Thanks so much for putting this together, this is an incredible resource! Is it possible to add multiple entries? I held two different roles this year and wanted to share salaries for both.

blueberrylemoncake·Dec 22, 2021

Thank you so much for putting this together!! It makes me sad to confirm that I am not earning as much as I should be in my area, but also gives me motivation to gear up for job interviews!! I wish talking about compensation with coworkers directly was more accepted.

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