The tweets start with “Hello” and end with “Thank you.” But the amiable tone belies a barbed message that aims to publicly shame nonprofits and foundations. Dozens have been targeted — big-name grant makers like the anti-poverty Blue Meridian Partners but also small groups like a nonprofit Canadian newsroom called the Walrus.
Each tweet notes that the organization has posted an advertisement for an open position that didn’t indicate how much the job would pay. Such “salary cloaking,” it continues, perpetuates racial and gender compensation gaps. “Please always #ShowTheSalary.”
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The tweets start with “Hello” and end with “Thank you.” But the amiable tone belies a barbed message that aims to publicly shame nonprofits and foundations. Dozens have been targeted — big-name grant makers like the anti-poverty Blue Meridian Partners but also small groups like a nonprofit Canadian newsroom called the Walrus.
Each tweet notes that the organization has posted an advertisement for an open position that didn’t indicate how much the job would pay. Such “salary cloaking,” it continues, perpetuates racial and gender compensation gaps. “Please always #ShowTheSalary.”
The author of these nettlesome Twitter posts is Vu Le, a former nonprofit executive who writes the blog NonprofitAF, which delivers critiques of the charity field that mix humor, sharp elbows, and outrage. Last month alone, he fired off 15 call-out tweets, sometimes several in one day.
For Le, this is a new tactic in a battle he’s waged since at least 2015, when he wrote, “Hiring managers, I am begging you … examine why you are not disclosing your salaries on job postings.” He took his crusade to Twitter in the past year or so because his blog and emails to organizations failed to stir action. “If you call them out in private, they usually just mosey on down and do nothing,” he says.
If he was once alone in a quixotic campaign, others now have taken up the cause. A group of anonymous fundraisers is waging a social-media call-out campaign, #ShowTheSalary, that has netted pledges from more than 280 organizations that appear to be mostly, if not entirely, in Britain to include pay in job postings. Employees are also pressing for change from within; some, Le says, ask him to turn up the heat with a Twitter post.
A growing number of organizations that host platforms for nonprofit job openings also are demanding that posts include salary details. Among these: NTEN, the Association of Midwest Museums, and the Association of Fundraising Professionals. “We demand transparency in the relationship between our donors and our organizations. … We should expect no less from our organizations when hiring a fundraiser (or any other position),” AFP declared in its October announcement.
Details about salaries are becoming more commonplace in the private sector as well. Nationally, the share of job ads that include such information has tripled since 2016, according to research by Boston University Law School scholars.
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Individual nonprofits are responding and connecting salary transparency to equity, whether spurred by pressure or their own concerns. “Five years ago, I don’t recall ever seeing salaries posted,” says compensation consultant Lisa McKeown with Nonprofit HR. “In another two to three years, it’s going to be the norm.”
Power and Pay Negotiations
Le and other advocates make a simple argument: Without salary details, job candidates enter pay negotiations at a severe disadvantage. Research indicates that women and workers of color face bias in pay talks and don’t fare well; partly as a result, they are paid less than their white male counterparts. Without a salary range, they are robbed of information that would strengthen their bargaining position and make negotiations more objective.
Research has not yet plumbed whether featuring pay in job ads improves equity in compensation. Such analysis is likely, as Colorado became a natural test case after it enacted a law in January that requires that employers include salaries in job postings.
Even without such direct research, studies suggest that pay transparency generally closes salary gaps. Compensation disclosure laws applied to Canada’s public sector reduced the roughly 7 percent gender wage gap among faculty at universities by about a third, according to one study.
A similar study of U.S. public universities facing new state public-disclosure laws found the difference between salaries for men and women shrank from 9 percent to 3 percent. The researchers, from the University of Utah and the HEC Paris business school, said that salaries available for all to see “pressured employers to more aggressively remedy inequities.” (They also warned the public airing of salaries can create strife in the workplace; transparency, wrote the University of Utah’s Todd Zenger in Harvard Business Review, “creates an expanded playground for our comparisons” and heightens employee obsession with pay.)
Closing pay gaps will require more than simply adding dollar signs to an advertisement, Le and others say. They campaign for better compensation for nonprofit workers generally. Some urge groups to link executive salaries to the wages of the lowest-paid workers to prevent gaping holes in their pay scales. They also call on groups to remove education requirements, which can stymie qualified candidates.
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Show the Salary leaders targeted job ads without salary data — what they call “salary secrecy” — out of all the inequitable hiring practices as low-hanging fruit. “We have to start somewhere,” their website says, “and this should be the simplest of asks if we are serious about addressing the pay gaps we all know exist.” (Despite its push for salary transparency, Show the Salary leaders remain anonymous and declined an interview request for this article. According to the group’s website, some fear losing their jobs if they are associated with the effort.)
Different Approaches
Job boards for nonprofits wrestle with the question of putting salaries in job ads and come away with various answers. In late 2019, when NTEN began to require salary information in ads posted on its job board, CEO Amy Sample Ward wrote a blog post titled, “You’re not serious about equity if you don’t post salaries.”
CharityJob, a British jobs website, earlier this year began to require a salary figure or range in ads for all positions except those overseas. “It saves candidates time if they have an idea of the salary on offer,” said founder Steve Wexler. “Expectations are aligned.”
“The equity argument,” he added, “did not weigh heavily with us. Candidate experience was the key reason.”
On the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s website, about a third of the several hundred job advertisements include salary information, according to publisher Michael Sisk. The Chronicle has no plans to require salary information but is following the debate and research closely, Sisk says.
“We’re going to continue to watch the discussion and the data that comes from the research,” Sisk adds. “But at the end of the day, it’s our responsibility — and it’s clearly our mission — to keep as many jobs on our site available to as many people as possible.”
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A little more than half of ads on the U.S.-based nonprofit job website Idealist include salary information — a practice Idealist promotes, according to founder Ami Dar. “We believe that showing salary ranges is a good, useful, and important thing,” he says. But if Idealist were to require ads to include such data, he says, organizations could game the system with ridiculously broad pay ranges that do more harm than good.
“Simply putting in the range doesn’t solve the equity problem, unfortunately,” he adds. “If the range is broad enough, it could still include inequity.”
‘Fighting the Wrong Battle’
Vincent Robinson, founder and managing partner of the 360 Group, an executive search firm that works for mission-driven organizations, worries that salaries in job postings are increasingly seen as a silver bullet for equity in hiring. In a recent Chronicle of Philanthropyopinion piece, Robinson applauded Show the Salary’s goal of equity but argued that it was “fighting the wrong battle.” His piece sparked a social-media brushfire and led to criticism of Robinson and the Chronicle in letters to the Chronicle’s editor.
Robinson and his firm specialize in recruiting and placing people of color, women, LGBTQ individuals, and people with disabilities in nonprofit leadership posts. Based on his firm’s nearly 20 years of experience, he says that posting a salary sometimes can dissuade qualified applicants who would bring diversity to an organization yet undervalue their own worth.
“I can’t tell you how many times my team and I have had to convince people — women and people of color — that they should put their hat in the ring,” he says. “We think they are qualified, accomplished, and highly competitive for the job. They don’t see it themselves.”
When those individuals see a salary figure that’s much higher than what they make, they can balk, he adds. “They will say, ‘I’ve never made that much money.’”
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Robinson says the cause of equity is better served at times by not publishing a salary range so as to draw as large and diverse a pool as possible. A recent 360 Group client intentionally seeking a leader of color didn’t want to “box themselves in” with a salary range that might put off candidates on both the high and low ends. It concluded its search by hiring and paying its “dream candidate” well beyond what had been budgeted.
“Transparency and equity are not synonymous,” Robinson says. “They relate to one another, but transparency doesn’t inherently yield equity.”
‘Agreed. We Will Fix.’
Economist James Bessen says his recent research rebuts Robinson’s experiences. He and colleagues at the University of Boston School of Law studied the effects of recent state laws prohibiting employers from asking for salary histories — bans that are now in place in at least 19 states and often stem from equity concerns. The scholars observed two changes following the bans: a boom in job ads with salaries and, interestingly, an increase in the number of people of color who change jobs. The two are related, Bessen believes, with the available salary information changing the job calculus.
The data “show very clearly that there is no detrimental effect from advertising salary, and there is a positive effect,” he adds. People of color, he says, “are responding to the jobs ads in ways they hadn’t before.”
Vu Le and others point to such analysis and say groups that dismiss their argument are ignoring a proven reality. “It’s like listening to ancient astronomers explaining, with great certainty, why the sun and planets revolve around the earth,” Le tweeted last year.
Advocates also are frustrated by job platforms that acknowledge the importance of disclosing salaries yet refuse to require it. CharityVillage, which posts job openings for nonprofits across Canada, faces a boycott by more than 70 organizations and 200 individuals demanding that it require salary information in advertisements. CharityVillage President Mary Barroll says the company promotes transparency and educates nonprofit employers about it: One blog post notes that lack of transparency can “create ethical problems” and aggravate inequities. At present, she says, it is gathering input from organizations as “we require a better understanding of their decisions about including salaries in their job postings.”
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Katie German, a boycott leader and director of advocacy and programs at FoodShare in Toronto, says: “It’s absurd that they say, ‘This is important,’ and yet there’s no action.”
Vu Le’s campaign, meanwhile, flipped a few organizations with his Twitter broadsides in June. Ecojustice Canada executive director Devon Page replied to Le’s tweet: “Agreed and thank you. We will fix.” The Walrus, too, promised change.
Most of Le’s missives, however, meet with silence or polite deferrals. Blue Meridian did not respond to his tweet or interview requests by the Chronicle. Kansas City PBS answered Le via Twitter: “Thank you for the feedback. We have relayed your comments to our Human Resources department for review and consideration.” (The organization later told the Chronicle that the “senior leadership team has decided to include salary ranges in postings moving forward.”)
Other groups say that before featuring pay in ads, they have work to do. Andrew Schiff, CEO of the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, a Le target in June, told the Chronicle that before the pandemic, it began to evaluate salaries with an eye to equity as a prelude to including ranges on job postings. Demands of the crisis swamped those efforts, Schiff said, but they hope to complete them “in the very near future so that we can implement a new policy of including salary ranges on all job postings.”
Many of McKeown’s clients at Nonprofit HR are conducting similar assessments before adding salaries to job ads. “It opens up a Pandora’s box if you start posting a hiring salary and you’re not paying your internal people in the same roles even close to that,” she says. “You create a big mess for yourself.”
She adds that groups “are genuinely attempting to correct inequities that have existed. It’s going to take 20 years or so, but they’re making a really strong attempt.”