How I Missed Out on Over $350,000 Working In Technology

Cassie Dennis from Monday Loves You tells us about the impact of salary history disclosure for woman in technology in a recent article published by Women Employed.

How I Missed Out on Over $350,000 Working In Technology

It’s been a weird and windy road since my 11-year-old-self lost a chess match to an IBM 360 in 1970. Let me be upfront about this — my degree is in psychology; I work in marketing; and, I wasn’t born at a time when tech was in the mainstream — yet I’ve had a long career working in technology and technology-driven roles.

How?

The short answer: I said YES whenever someone asked me “can you figure out how to use this thing?!?”

It wasn’t always pretty, but I did learn how to use, configure, test, assemble and sell a variety of tech over the years, finding my niche in the software world by enabling people to solve problems with statistics, analytics, reporting and CRM.

The long answer reveals my icy patches, detours, and mudslides — from having a lucrative software sales territory I’d built from the ground up stripped from me and gifted to a male colleague because he had a family to support, to being promoted into a middle management position where I had the same responsibilities as my colleagues but a salary about 15 per cent less than theirs. Losing that sales territory prompted me to change pathways — taking me from an individual contributor role into management, which was ultimately a good thing . However, making less than my management colleagues in that one job was not a blip but a persistent drag on my earnings potential not only in that company but for the next 20 years of my career.

Why?