Eventually, my group’s creative director—a woman—noticed there was a huge gap between my salary and my male colleague’s. She corrected it by giving me a raise, and also adjusting both of our titles. I was happy.

After that, we hired on a male creative director who was favorable toward his male employees. He promoted the male designer to a senior level, and boosted his salary by another $20,000. He didn’t promote me—and only adjusted my salary by $8,000. I spoke with my creative director plenty of times about this pay issue during our one on one meetings, and he’d cut me off after I would say something like, “Oh, there’s stats out there that females get underpaid next to their male coworkers,” with “Well, that’s not true anymore.”

He told me that me that my male coworker spoke up more and was very vocal, whereas I’d been maintaining and making clients happy. He said he wanted me to work on pitching to clients more and then we could discuss a promotion. So I tried to pitch more, but it never happened. In fact, the one chance I had at running a meeting with a client, the male creative director took over the entire thing! He didn’t even give me a chance to speak. Eventually, I left the company and vowed to never let that happen to me again. — Karen, advertising, Tampa

My boss felt bad I was paid less, but said the company didn’t have the budget to fix it.

Salary: $70,000; Pay Gap: $20,000: I was a section editor at a magazine, and my male colleague had a similar title. The main difference, though, is that I ran a team and was in charge of producing both daily and long form content for the website, while also curating and editing an entire print section. He, on the other hand, didn’t have any print responsibilities and also didn’t run a team.

I found out that he was being paid $20,000 more than me through a coworker, who had been told firsthand. I’ve always tried to be pretty transparent about how much I make, because I think the idea that it’s “impolite” to talk about money is perpetuated by men who don’t want to be confronted with a pay gap—and therefore feel morally responsible for fixing something that they benefit from. Like, if they don’t know then it can’t really happen, right?

My first thought upon finding out was embarrassment, to be honest. I don’t know why, I just felt kind of humiliated. Like maybe I wasn’t doing a good job, even though I was doing so much work and my team seemed to really like me. But then I got pissed. I was well-regarded by my superiors and the people who reported to me, I was doing the job of two people—two actual people!—and I was making less than someone with far fewer responsibilities? That made me mad.

I brought it up at my next review, which was maybe a couple months later. I don’t recall my exact words, but I basically said that I wanted a raise and deserved one, and that I knew what my male colleague was making. The difference in our responsibilities was pretty evident, so just my knowing about it underlined the point. And my manager was aware that it was unfair, and was even sympathetic about it. But unfortunately, I was told they were on a budget freeze, and couldn’t offer to give me more until at least the end of the year. I waited a few months and when the money never materialized—and a few other issues arose—I finally quit.

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