Nelson heard their concerns, but ultimately whether to take on the possible discomfort of pay transparency would be her call. There might be high turnover or low morale in the ranks. The advisers imagined a staff full of disgruntled workers demanding meetings, everyone wanting to be at the top of the pay band. Some trusted advisers who invested in Nelson’s business were less than enthusiastic about the second part of this plan. First, they needed to determine pay bands for various positions then they needed to make those pay bands public, inside and outside the company. Nelson and Murphy decided that they should move forward quickly on two fronts. Clearly her employees felt empowered to talk to one another about their salaries.

Even more relevant, however, is the ethos of the Riveter, which offers educational content and services for businesses, promising to help them learn “what is working for other industries and workplaces to increase equity.” Her employees, about 85 percent of whom are women, would be aware of a growing body of research suggesting that one of the most effective remedies for race and gender discrepancies in salary is pay transparency. Her staff of 80 or so employees are, for the most part, members of a generation that has blasted through boundaries and privacy concerns that were once the norm.

Nelson recognized that the culture of secrecy at work has changed since then. It was tacky.” But now that she was the boss, she also realized that her silence around pay all those years was not merely a personal choice. “I was taught you didn’t talk about money,” says Nelson, who is 40. And yet in all her years as a lawyer, she never once considered asking a colleague how much he or she earned, nor did anyone ever ask her. Before founding the Riveter, Nelson worked as a corporate lawyer in highly competitive professional environments where everyone was expected to be superb negotiators. Information she previously controlled was on the brink of breaking free.

Nelson had a momentary sinking feeling as she heard the details of the conversation.

She told the young woman she would have to get back to her. Now that she knew, the young woman felt an adjustment was in order. Nelson was confused: Hadn’t they just hired this person a few months earlier? Why was she already trying to renegotiate her salary? Murphy told her the back story: The young woman had asked a co-worker in a similar position what she was earning and was troubled to learn that the co-worker was earning more - not drastically more, but more. Murphy informed her that a young woman they recently hired had come to her asking for a pay raise. Late last spring, Amy Nelson, chief executive and founder of the Riveter, a business that offers feminist-minded co-working spaces, sat down for a meeting with her chief marketing officer, Kerry Murphy.

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