I Paid Women Less — and They Let Me

I have paid women less than I was willing to pay them. More than once. And they let me.

I spent years on the hiring side of the table as a senior executive, and I could usually tell within minutes whether the woman across from me had ever talked about money with anyone. If she hadn't, she accepted the offer on the spot, or she negotiated her vacation days and left her salary untouched. I never set out to underpay anyone. But I didn't volunteer money she didn't ask for, and neither will anyone else.

Here is why that should keep you up at night. Only one in four women has a written retirement plan. The same Transamerica report found that women have saved a median of $56,000 for retirement, compared with $92,000 for men, and that 44 percent of women are afraid of outliving their money. They should be. You cannot plan for a number you've never said out loud.

I know the women in those statistics. I've led thousands of them. They can forecast a quarter in their heads while driving the carpool. They manage the household budget, the school calendar, an aging parent, and the company's P&L, often in the same week. And three out of four of them have never written down their own number.

I don't believe the problem is math. I believe the problem is that we don't talk about it.

The dinner table

A few weeks ago, I brought up money at dinner with a group of girlfriends. It's a conversation I enjoy, so it didn't occur to me that anyone would mind. The table went quiet almost immediately. Someone laughed, someone changed the subject, and within a minute we were talking about kids.

That table, it turns out, was a fair sample of the country. When Wells Fargo surveyed thousands of Americans about the subjects they find hardest to discuss, personal finance landed just behind sex and ahead of politics, religion, and personal health. Among women, half described money as private, and a third said they were afraid of being judged for talking about it.

So we talk about everything else. We'll tell a friend about a marriage in trouble, a frightening diagnosis, or a struggling child. We'll describe a surgery in detail before we'll say what we earn. The one subject that touches every part of our lives is the one we keep in a drawer.

What the drawer cost them

Back to the women across my desk.

What they wouldn't touch was salary. They wouldn't ask about the bonus structure, equity, or a signing bonus for joining mid-year. They rarely asked when the company's retirement match would begin, or what the real scope of the role was and whether the pay reflected it.

And almost none of them raised severance. I'll say that again, because at the vice president level and above, it matters more than any other line in the offer: negotiate your exit before you negotiate your vacation. Severance is the thing that protects you in the three, six, or twelve months after you and a company part ways, and the women I hired almost never asked for it.

In my experience, the men I hired seemed to arrive having already compared notes with someone. The women seemed to arrive alone. I can't prove that was true in every case, but I saw the pattern often enough to recognize it.

The research suggests I wasn't imagining it. A study of 4,600 employees across 800 workplaces found that women ask for raises as often as men do. Men received a raise 20 percent of the time; women, 15 percent. The problem, in other words, is not that women fail to ask. It's that we often ask without knowing what anyone else was paid and without a sentence ready for what comes after the request.

The women who talk about it

Over twenty-five years of leading women, I've noticed a consistent pattern: the women who talk about money tend to be the women who have it.

That isn't because talking makes anyone wealthy. It's because talking is how you learn what you don't know. It's how you discover that the woman beside you asked for more and received it. It's how you find out what the man in your role was paid. And it's how you hear a number spoken aloud enough times that it stops being frightening.

Fidelity found something similar. More than half of the women it surveyed said that talking about money with other women made them feel more confident, and the women who were part of those conversations were more likely to go on and make a plan. No one lectured them. Someone simply told them a number.

I learned this lesson slowly, and in my own home. I could stand in a room full of men who had been in business longer than I had been alive and recite a company's numbers without blinking: a hundred million dollars in a single state, six hundred million in a region, nineteen countries. None of it frightened me because none of it was mine. Then I would go home and find that I could not say my own number at my own kitchen table.

The sentence problem

What I eventually understood is that the price was never the problem. The sentence was.

Ask a woman what her team accomplished, and she can talk for ten minutes. Ask what she accomplished, and a qualifier appears almost immediately. "We hit the number, but I had a great team." "I built that, but it was years ago." I've said both about a company I built from my kitchen table.

This is usually described as a confidence problem. I don't think it is. The women I know have plenty of confidence. What they lack is the sentence, and you cannot negotiate a number you can't narrate.

The remedy is smaller than it sounds. Put a period where the "but" used to be. "We hit the number." Let it stand. If the team deserves credit, give them a sentence of their own. Then say what the last organization that paid you received for its money, state your number, and stop talking.

Four conversations

Becoming one of the one in four doesn't require a spreadsheet this week. It requires a conversation and, over time, four of them.

The first is with the person you share your life with. My husband and I sat down before we were married and decided how we would handle money and how often we would revisit it. We still do, every quarter: what are we building toward, what will it cost, and are we aligned? For anyone without a partner, the first conversation is with a financial planner, and many offer a free initial meeting. I should be clear that I am not one. I'm not an advisor, an accountant, or an attorney, and nothing here is financial advice. It is an invitation to the conversation.

The second is with a mentor or advisor, and it should be specifically about your work: what you were offered, what you asked for, and what you may have left on the table.

The third is with a woman a few steps ahead of you. Ask her for a number rather than for advice. What did she charge in her first year? What did she ask for when she moved up? In my experience, women will answer if the question is asked plainly. Almost no one asks.

The fourth is with a woman a few steps behind you, and that is the one you owe. Every time I have shared a real number with a younger leader, I've watched her shoulders drop. She wasn't broken. She simply had never heard anyone say it out loud.

Money is not rude

Talking about money is not rude. It is not presumptuous, and it is not a sign of ingratitude or a lack of faith. I believe we are called to steward what we've been given, and no one can steward what she refuses to look at.

Nobody underpaid the women across my desk more effectively than their own silence. A plan that exists only in your head is a wish. Put it on paper, with your name on it and a date when you'll look at it again. Then say one real number, out loud, to one real person this week.

Somewhere this week, a woman will sit across a desk from someone like me. She'll be offered a number. She'll be qualified, prepared, and quietly thrilled. And she'll say yes before the sentence is finished because nobody ever told her what the woman before her was paid.

Don't be her. Open the drawer.

Meredith Tieszen is a private executive advisor, author, and independent board advisor, and the former President of cabi, LLC, and former Global Chief Sales Officer of It Works! Global, where she led sales across nineteen countries. She built her first company from her kitchen table, took the lowest-performing region in a national company to number one, and now advises senior executives, speaks on leadership, and hosts the Rooted Leadership podcast. Her book, I'm Just, is available for pre-order in December 2026.