Unequal Pay Cost Me My Job and My Hearing
When I learned I was making 20% less than a male coworker, I didn’t think it was a big deal. I lived in Germany, a country that proudly spouts social and legal gender equality. I worked at a creative agency so progressive that it created a webpage to help Ukrainian refugees and fought through German bureaucracy to get gender-neutral bathrooms in the new Munich office. My bosses, Angie and Sara, constantly spoke of advancing women and minorities in the workplace. So, when I learned that the new, less experienced male editor working at my same level would earn a whopping €10,000 more than me, I didn’t think it was a big deal because I knew the problem would be fixed.
The week before the new editor started, I brought the issue up with Sara, my team lead. I had already asked her and Angie about a salary raise during my annual review but was told that raises only happen every two years. For me, that two-year mark would be five months after the new guy arrived. “That’s a long time to make such different salaries for the same position,” I said.
“I’ll look into it,” Sara assured.
The new editor started. I brought the issue up with Sara at each of our bi-weekly one-on-ones. In each meeting, I presented more evidence that she could give to Angie, the Content Director: my CV vs his; my publications vs his; our levels of education; the salary standards of Munich; Germany’s laws that dictate men and women be paid the same amount for equal work.
“Salaries have ranges,” Sara said with a sigh one meeting. “Not everyone in the same position makes the same amount. It’s based on things like experience and qualifications.”
“All of which are in my favor,” I reminded her.
She nodded. “A lot of women here aren’t paid the same as men. You would be shocked to know the difference between what a male director makes versus a female director.”
Living in a country where I speak only a beginner level of the native language, I am used to my brain needing a few seconds to catch up to what my ears hear. It takes time to knit each word together to form the sentence. The needles in my head click-clacked around a strand of yarn as I stared at Sara’s thick, black-rimmed glasses in the Microsoft Teams video screen. Surely, she wasn’t trying to excuse the pay gap. The new editor was just starting his career, whereas I was several years into mine. I had compared us over and over, and the only 20% difference I could find: gender.
There is no research to back up the notion that men are more aggressive at salary negotiations than women, yet all of my female friends and I knew this from general life experiences. When I asked their opinions about the new editor’s salary, nearly all stated that they never go into a job interview with a high salary offer. Didn’t that make us seem demanding? High maintenance? If you asked for too much, couldn’t the company turn you down without even entering into a back-and-forth?
My fiancé and his male friends had a different approach: ask for the highest salary possible and see what happens. “If they accept my first offer,” one guy said, “I know I’ve asked for too low.”
I asked Sara if I should bring the issue to Angie. Given Sara’s usual adamant down with the patriarchy attitude, her brushoffs surprised me — if anyone was going to support me in this, I thought it would be her — but I understood her reluctance. I was opening a can of worms that couldn’t be closed. Angie and Sara were close friends, often sleeping over at each other’s houses when working late on a pitch or campaign. Sara’s husband was also a business director at our agency, so I knew my request might be putting her in an uncomfortable position.
It was weirdly putting me in an uncomfortable position, too. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my constant insistence to be paid the same as a man made me look greedy. I liked my job, and I had asked for my salary (although it was in the middle of the Covid lockdowns and I was moving to Germany from Portugal, a country with much lower salary ranges). Shouldn’t I be happy with it? My mother had voiced the same: “You and your fiancé make a decent living together. If you like your job, why should the money matter?” The thought stuck in my head. A full-time editing job isn’t easy to get. I was writing about interesting topics. This is what I went to graduate school for. Shouldn’t that be enough?
Then I would think about the two salaries, and I just couldn’t find the logic. Why would he make €10K more for the same work? He wasn’t my supervisor. Hell, I was the one training him. As Sara kept saying, salaries have ranges, but why would the range be so vast in the less experienced person’s favor? And my mom, although a fierce feminist, had grown up in a time when women were more openly put on a lower rung. When she and my dad first married, he had to sign off on her getting a credit card. Her advice came from what she’d grown up with: women who make waves get punished.
But that wasn’t how I grew up. I grew up being told that women were equal to men in every way. Period. Teachers, politicians, and celebrities decried all the reasons for the gender pay gap: women are encouraged to enter the humanities and men the sciences; women are still seen as the primary caregivers and need more time off; women, in general, simply make less than men for the exact same job. Society taught me that men and women are equal, but the cards are still stacked in men’s favor. I needed to push back against injustice whenever I could. So, I pushed back.
When five months of Sara saying “I’ll look into it” passed, I took matters into my own hands. I emailed the agency’s Betriebsrat — the works council — explaining the situation and asking if someone could help. They met that day and said yes, it did look like I had a case of gender-based pay. They would bring this up with the management.
The next day, Sara asked if I could meet in the office on Friday. My stomach flipped. Sara rarely came to the office and certainly never on a Friday. The timing of the meeting with my email to the works council felt too coincidental, but I chalked it up to paranoia. You couldn’t be fired for asking for a higher salary. Germany’s Wage Transparency Act, enacted specifically to weed out the gender pay gap, gave me the legal right to know the new editor’s salary, so I couldn’t be fired for that either. And firing a woman for wanting equal pay? In Europe? In 2023? No way.
I quelled my fears by reminding myself that Sara and I worked on several client projects together. Maybe the meeting was about that. Or maybe she had heard about my email and there would finally be a resolution to my equal pay quest.
On the morning of the meeting, I didn’t see Sara at all. Strange for a small, open-layout office. I messaged her via Microsoft Teams: “Are we still meeting in person?”
“Of course!” she replied. “I’m in the corner office.”
At exactly noon I walked into the office and froze. Hidden by the door should anyone walk by and look through the window, sat Angie. Angie only came to meetings to deliver bad news.
Both women smiled and asked me to sit. Sara looked at the table as Angie quietly told me that I would be made redundant for not speaking German.
I balked. “Why isn’t HR here?” I asked.
“You don’t need HR,” Angie responded. Anger flushed up my neck and into my cheeks. My head felt like someone shoved my brain into a vice grip.
I looked between Sara and Angie. “This is because I want to be paid the same as a man?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Angie said, knitting her brows. The company was going in a different direction, she explained. Although I was an editor on the English Team, fluency in German would soon be required. I reminded her that I had a permanent contract, which required three warnings plus the chance for education and improvement between each warning before I could be let go.
“I don’t know anything about that,” Angie repeated. I asked for HR again. Angie slid a paper detailing a severance package towards me.
“Why is this happening three days after I contacted the works council?” I snapped.
Again, Angie said she didn’t know anything about that.
The meeting might have lasted five minutes. It might have been an hour. I kept my eyes glued to the unsigned severance paper and said very little except that I wanted to talk to HR. Sara offered to order an Uber for me. I said I’d rather walk. Angie suggested I get a lawyer. “No shit,” I said before picking up my laptop and walking out in what I hoped was a defiant manner.
I made it out of the building and halfway home before I fell sobbing in the open, tree-less field that hosts Oktoberfest each year.
The next several weeks were a blur of lawyers, panic attacks, negotiations, and a low ringing in my right ear. My lawyer said we would go after the agency for discrimination. “They can’t let you go for not speaking German,” he said.
“That’s not the reason,” I reminded him. “They won’t pay me the same as a man. Others at the agency don’t speak German. They aren’t being made redundant.”
“Gender discrimination is hard to win,” he assured me. “They’ll drag you into court.”
I wanted to go to court. I wanted to hang a large, sparkly banner from the top of the Olympic Tower, the tallest spot in Munich, calling out the agency, Sara, and Angie for the sexist scumbags that they were. I wanted them branded with a giant, red S. Our agency was part of Hubert Burda Media, Germany’s fourth largest media company. I wanted the stakeholders of the media firm to know. I wanted them to do something. I wanted someone to be as outraged and upset as I was over such outright and obvious gender discrimination.
The month before Angie and Sara’s surprise ambush, a woman near Dresden, Germany won a legal battle over the same issue: a man hired a few months after her for the same position made a much higher salary. The courts ruled in her favor: “Negotiation skills do not justify unequal pay.”
“She started that battle in 2017,” my lawyer said sadly. “We could do it, but you’ll be paying my fees the entire time.” Six years. He also didn’t know how it would impact my right to stay in Germany, something which had also crossed my mind. Would my company have pulled the same stunt with a German woman? Or did they know I was slightly more vulnerable as a visa-needing foreigner?
I felt defeated. As I told people at work what was happening — including the editor whose salary started the whole debacle — many nodded knowingly. The company had openly let a woman in a senior position go just months before her maternity leave. That, too, is illegal in Germany and yet it had happened.
When the lawyers finally came to an agreement, I lay on the floor of my apartment. I held the phone to my left ear, no longer able to hear anything but buzzing in my right.
“They really want to get rid of me,” I said. Until that moment, I still believed that the agency would see how immoral, illegal, and just plain cruel they were being. I had outlandish hope that my coworkers would storm out in protest. That someone would finally call and say, “Oh, you just wanted equal pay? We can do that!”
“I think if they fix your salary, they have to fix others, too,” my lawyer said.
On my last day at work, Sara messaged me: “Happy last day!” Angie called during my last fifteen minutes to wish me well, the first time we’d spoken since the ambush. I wanted to tell them both to go to hell.
I hated my settlement deal. Not because of the amount, but because of what I felt it symbolized: another step back on the path to equality. Everything had been on my side: my experience, my determination, the law, and, I had thought, Sara and Angie, two radical feminists in positions of power. Yet I had still lost. I also learned through a friend that the new male editor received a salary raise soon after my departure, which made me feel like everything about my salary, including the “it only happens every two years” excuse, had been shrouded in inequality.
When the agency posted my job vacancy on LinkedIn, the job ad stated, “Knowledge of German is a benefit.” I called my lawyer immediately. “It wasn’t because of the German,” I said. “This proves it!”
“We always knew that,” he agreed. “But it’s still harder to win. You have to let it go.”
The next day, I stared at an MRI scan of my brain as a doctor said that nothing medical explained the ringing in my ears or the hearing loss. “This can sometimes happen due to stress,” she said. “Have you been stressed lately?”
I gave her the abridged version: “I just lost my job and I’m getting married.”
She nodded. “That could do it.”
Today is Equal Pay Day in Germany. The date fluctuates from country to country and is chosen based on how far into the next year a woman with a median range salary must work to earn the same amount a man with a median range salary earned the previous year. For “all women” the date falls around March. For women of color, the dates stretch into June, July, and even November.
In 2022, Germany had the fourth largest gender pay gap in Europe, between Czechia and Slovakia. In 2023, the country’s pay gap averaged around 18%. Equal Pay Day that year fell on March 7*, ten days before Angie slid a severance package towards me.
Although it’s been a year, I’m still trying to process my feelings about the event. Sara and Angie were let go from the agency soon after me, something my lawyer and friends have said might be because they approved the new editor’s salary in the first place, knowing it was 20% higher than mine, and were the direct cause of the unequal gender pay. I also got a hearing aid after several doctors said my hearing was unlikely to return. When I slip the device over my ear, I am constantly reminded why I wear it. At first, I saw it as an emblem of where I had failed: the other women in the agency who I had failed by not going into debt for a long, drawn-out legal battle; the generations I was letting down. Then there were the agency’s male management and CEO whom I was just letting get away with underpaying women.
Now, I see it as a sign that I won’t let injustices slide. I didn’t accept the unequal pay and I didn’t just pack up and find another job. I fought back and tried to enact change. I demanded equality and got burned, but not every battle is won in a war. Small skirmishes create small change, which eventually turn into bigger, more noticeable change. Angie and Sara will probably think twice before approving unequal pay again or not supporting a female employee. Maybe the agency will, too.
When people ask why I wear a hearing aid, I tell them: “I lost my job due to sexism.” It’s a badge of war. We all have them.
*Equal Pay Day in 2024 is a day earlier not because the pay gap has shrunk, but because it’s a leap year.
