Millennials love to share.
They invented the share button and the sharing economy. They share their mundane thoughts on social media and their passwords to streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. So it comes as no surprise that a recent survey from the financial planning company Bankrate found millennials are nearly twice as likely to share their salary information as their baby boomer parents are.
Pay transparency has garnered a lot of attention as of late. Jackie Luo, a software engineer at the payments company Square, recently published the salaries of thousands of tech employees—including her own—that she had accumulated via social media over the past few months. ”Fair compensation starts with greater transparency,” she wrote in a recent Medium post.
Luo’s candor has sparked a conversation in Silicon Valley and beyond about the systemic biases that favor one group over another at work. Knowing what your colleagues make can be the first step in creating a more equitable workplace. But pay transparency is not just an issue at the office.
Perhaps most surprising, 31% of the more than 1,000 participants in the survey had never told a live-in romantic partner how much money they make. “Not telling your friends how much you make is one thing, but failing to share that information with a significant other could be a bad idea,” said Bankrate.com analyst Amanda Dixon. “When you’re setting short-term or long-term financial goals, it’s impossible to be on the same page if you’re not open and honest about how much money is coming in.”