Salary Transparency, Mentorship, and Monday Girl.

In today's competitive job market, where every LinkedIn update showcases peers landing promotions or joining top-tier companies, it's only natural to wonder: "What's their salary range? How are they negotiating this? And more importantly, am I the only one unsure about what salary to ask for during a job interview?"

It was the unspoken rules of navigating the workplace including salary negotiation that pushed myself and my co-founder Istiana, as fresh graduates with their first “big-girl” jobs, to create a forum for women like ourselves to openly discuss these topics. We thought that there had to be a better way to get relevant and actionable career advice. Asking my parents for their advice made me realize how outdated their ideas on work were and on the flip side, advice from Google felt generic and dull. This led us to create Monday Girl, a membership network for Gen-Z and millennial women to discuss all things career-related and get access to a roster of mentors from top companies.

Recent data from Statistics Canada (2022)¹ paints a concerning picture: as of 2021, for every dollar earned by men, women earned 89 cents. The data also shows that the gender pay gap is worse for those who face multiple barriers, including racialized women, Indigenous women, and women with disabilities. While we can acknowledge that there are a multitude of factors contributing to this gap, at Monday Girl, we know that financial transparency is one of the levers that we can use more broadly to educate and bring awareness to this issue.

Enter Monday Girl and our “Pay Day” social media series, our call to transparency… or as we like to refer to as “real-ness”. We extended an invitation to our community of professional women, encouraging them to anonymously share insights into their earnings. This included everything from their primary job salaries to the income from their side gigs, and even how much they had in their savings or investment accounts.

We were blown away by the overwhelmingly positive sentiment and eagerness to share their information. The DMs and emails were pouring with comments including the following:

The reality is that discussing one's earnings can be… awkward, if not generationally taboo. In fact, there are many instances we’ve seen where sharing your salary can often be actively discouraged in workplaces. Our "Pay Day" series is our call for change to stop leaving women in the dark about potential disparities in pay. However, we don’t just stop at awareness - we’re equipping our Monday Girl Social Club members with the knowledge that they need to advocate for the salary they deserve. Members get to access salary negotiation workshops led by HR leaders and mentors also help our members navigate tough salary conversations in our Monday Girl group chat.

In fact, a LinkedIn survey² highlighted that a staggering 80% of jobs are secured through networking. The 2020 LinkedIn Global Talent Trends report³ further underscored this, indicating that Canadian women were 26% less likely to have a robust professional network compared to their male counterparts. Recognizing the financial disadvantage and trickle-down effects, the lack of access to a strong professional network, especially for women, was the catalyst for Istiana and I to build Monday Girl.

Whether you're starting a new career or looking to grow, it was important that we built a platform that could provide the right opportunities to connect with mentors, join networking events, and share experiences. Mentorship has long been recognized as a crucial factor in career advancement. A study⁴ from Wharton found that employees with mentors are more likely to be promoted than those without a mentor. With a roster of 100+ mentors with senior positions from leading companies across various industries, the Monday Girl platform has facilitated 2000+ mentor and mentee coffee chats, leading to career advancements and lasting connections.

Through initiatives like the "Pay Day" series and our unwavering focus on mentorship, we envision a world where women are not only informed but are empowered to bravely and proudly advocate for themselves in the workplace. You in?

As a part of their membership dashboard, oxio and Monday Girl have partnered up to deliver customers and career-oriented women radical transparency within the workplace and career space.