| Welcome to Bw Daily, the Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we'll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine's usual charm every weekday. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here. If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. We want to hear what you think of our Bw newsletters. Take our survey here. I've been working since I was about 10 years old. Both out of economic anxiety—I come from a lower-middle-class family—and a hunger for life experience. My career has been varied: My first job was as a newspaper delivery girl, followed by gigs as an ice cream scooper, university computer lab assistant, women's magazine editor, author, founder of feminist website Jezebel, podcasting executive and, it appears, a pretty OK writer. All of this is to say that, though I've had some success, I'm still surprised, and a little delighted, to find myself at the helm of an advice column about work. Why? For one, I'm not a known giver of advice: I'm not regularly asked for practical, psychological or spiritual assistance. For two, it's not like I've been successful in everything I've tried. Furthermore, I'm horrible at taking others' offers of counsel and succor. (Case in point: my entire romantic relationship history. I can't say I wasn't warned.) Luckily for everyone, this isn't an advice column focused on love but on work—that part of life where, if we're lucky, we're able to imbue ourselves with a feeling of competence and mastery, and a steady income. (As for those of us who aren't so lucky? I hear you loud and clear.) We decided to call this column "Sad Desk Salad" not only because it's funny but also because it sums up the ways in which work takes precedence over everything else—including a leisurely, civilized meal beyond the walls of a tiny office cubicle—in which our colleagues and professional peers serve as substitute families. Albeit often dysfunctional ones. Unlike this column's namesake, we aim to be interesting, entertaining and informative. Frank, even. With that, here's our first question, submitted by an entertainment exec named "Amy" in California. (Names and identifying details will be changed in this column.) Take Amy's lead and send us your most (and least!) pressing work-related queries here, or to sadsalad@bloomberg.net. • • • • • A direct deposit statement for my co-worker was sent to my house. I'm incredibly tempted to open it, and my therapist says I should—she thinks I should know, as a woman, what my male peers are being paid. What do you think? —Amy W., 45, Santa Monica I love your therapist. She knows what's up (pay inequity) and maybe even how to combat it. Sure, call it projection, call it whatever you want, but I feel seen by her. Understood. And I'd tell you to do the same thing except … I can't. Opening another person's mail is considered a federal offense—an "obstruction of correspondence"—and I can't exactly kick off this column with an exhortation to commit a crime, now, can I? Interestingly, I've experienced a similar conundrum: I once received the paycheck of a colleague about whom I had extremely negative feelings, mostly because of the way he lorded things over me and undermined my work at every possible turn. I turned the (unopened) envelope over to him—by the way, who still gets paper checks in the mail?—but I wondered whether I did the right thing. I still do. I also wondered whether the method of steaming envelopes open, as seen in the movies, works in real life. (Turns out, according to the internet, it does! Freezing works, too.) But back to your question. It seems like the larger issue here, for you and your therapist, is the understanding that women often get paid less than men do for doing the same job. While doing that same job as well or better than men! Women often pay steep penalties for their competence, especially among men, who seem so easily threatened by, or disbelieving of, female confidence and success. (This is an important part of the reason, I think, for continued pay inequity.) I remember being interviewed by the fiftysomething head of a company for a job and being asked, while sitting in a glass-enclosed conference room with exposed brick, whether I "know how to be humble." Let me repeat, for emphasis: A middle-aged man who was interviewing me, a grown woman, for a high-level job at his company, actually sat across a conference room table and said, "Do you know how to be humble?" My first thought was: What business or management book did he pull this one out of? My second was: Did someone say something about me to him? My third: Would he ever ask such a thing of a man? My fourth: How am I going to answer this question? Turns out that I answered it pretty well. I told him that I'm a hard worker who plays well with others and enjoys collaboration, especially around creative endeavors. But, I added, I have no compunction about taking credit where credit is due, and I don't think that makes me or anyone else arrogant. Just assertive. F--- the patriarchy and all that. But does f---ing the patriarchy also legitimize, in this case or in others, an intrusion into someone else's private correspondence? Or breaking the law? My answer is: I honestly don't know. Proprietary information is just that, proprietary. And breaking the law is breaking the law. (Don't do it!) But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I'd be tempted myself to open it; that there's an "activist" part of me that wonders whether, at least in the case of work, compensation and pay inequity, people should privilege transparency over privacy so as to offer employees more opportunities to level the playing the field. Knowledge is power, etc. Plus, that you even have to consider doing something like this in the first place tells you a lot about the ways in which women and other workers on the "lower" rung of the corporate ladder are often negotiating from a place of naivete. Anyway! I decided to ask my own therapist, we'll call her Tamra, what she thinks you should do. Tamra has had my back in many a professional setting: She was a first line of defense against a difficult boss in one of my more recent gigs, who convinced me to relocate by promising me a job with a certain salary augmented by a bonus system and then reneged on said salary. Not to sound too political, but Tamra is well aware of, and quick to discuss, the ways in which women and people of color are undermined at every turn by a corporate capitalist culture in which the people who control the purse strings pad the paychecks of those who look and act most like them. Does she think you should open the envelope? "Probably not." And then, for emphasis: "After all, it's a crime!" For the rest of the column—another good question!—go here. | 
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