Why I Didn't Speak Up Earlier
My former employer is having a very bad week. I worked at Mailchimp from March 2011 to November 2012. I wrote an anonymized version of the latter part of my experience already. I talked to the reporter for the Business Insider story, and it’s likely to come out soon. I opted not to be anonymous. During this process, he asked me two questions that made me think and want to write a bit more about my own perspective.
Did you talk to your coworkers about salaries?
Do you have any documentation of reports you made?
The answer to both of those is no. I’m going to dig into each one by one.
I grew up being told that you should not discuss salaries. I even thought it was illegal, or I could get in trouble for it! Even a few years ago, I was onboarding for a job and the HR person said pay was something we could not talk about, other than to our manager. Just in case you don’t know: in the United States, you are legally protected when discussing salaries with coworkers. It is in your best interest to discuss salaries with coworkers. Keeping quiet about salaries increases pay inequality. However, I was 24 when I started at Mailchimp, it was my second job out of college, and I had no idea. I was the only woman in engineering and I was paid $45,000. The excuse for the low pay was that I didn’t have any experience… but the role was for a deliverability engineer, which is a role that only exists at email service providers and internet service providers. There are still not many of those and there were even fewer in 2011… especially in the Atlanta area. The other guy in my department only had one year of experience, only at Mailchimp. I had an engineering degree and almost a year working in IT at Home Depot. Given that I know know that entry-level support made $35,000, I do not doubt that I was the lowest-paid engineer by far. I wish I had talked about salaries with my coworkers then and even in later roles because it took me years to realize that I was being underpaid. I think another reason Mailchimp gets away with this is that, for many people, it’s their first professional job and it’s just great to have healthcare. But given how much money Ben and Dan have made off the backs of their poorly-treated support team, I think they could have easily paid their employees a bit more.
As far as documentation, there is no documentation from me because I never made an official report. One of my coworkers would lift his shirt a bit in meetings, scratch his stomach, and stare at me. It was unnerving and very creepy. Why didn’t I report that? Well, everyone was aware he was creepy. I was young and we were all “friends”. Why would I report a friend? Plus, everyone knew he was a creep, so obviously, he wasn’t doing anything wrong, right? Looking back, I think it felt like someone else should have come in to fix it, but there was no one else. All I felt I could do was ask my boss not to make me share an office with the guy. One day while we were all (at least 20 people) eating lunch, another guy on my team decided to start debating what makes a person. Then he posed the question, “Are people with Down’s Syndrome really people? They have an extra chromosome, so if DNA makes a human, do they count?” I was pretty dismayed, mentioned that was inappropriate, but didn’t do anything beyond that. There were managers in that room; if it could be acted on, they would surely do something. That man is now a manager at Mailchimp. He is also the person who made it so uncomfortable for me to work there that I moved up to Boston with the first job I could get and a full 6 months earlier than I planned.
So why didn’t I speak up earlier? Like many people, I felt like Mailchimp had an outsized influence on my career. I was worried that, if I said anything against them, it would be a black mark against me. Even after I moved states… twice. Even now, I was hesitant. It also felt like, on an overall scale, it wasn’t that bad, right? I was never propositioned or assaulted, A+ for that. And yet… in all the companies I have worked for, Mailchimp still stands out as the place that feels the most problematic (other than the super tiny vegan startup that shall not be named), even almost 9 years later.