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Rae Taylor

The Benefits and Downsides of Wage Transparency

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I have little issue with telling people what I get paid unless they ask. I think this juxtaposition comes from the age-old question of nature vs. nurture as I was raised to never talk about money, not even to family members. That’s the nurture. But when I was applying for my first “grown-up” job, I experienced firsthand how difficult it is to negotiate compensation without knowing how much peer employees are paid. That’s … well, that’s more nurture, I guess. Anyway, while I was interviewing for positions, I collected all the information I could find on average salaries for recent engineering graduates. Unfortunately, there was such a huge variation in the reported values that they were useless. So, I decided to break the ultimate wage transparency taboo. I walked up to a person in my graduating year, job offers in hand, and asked if we could chat about salaries.

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Career Fear (And How to Overcome It)

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In an earlier blog, I alluded to the vicious cycle of thinking you can’t study, which will guarantee that you actually can’t study. Some people messaged me about this and it got me thinking about the games our minds play on us.

A few years back, I made the decision to leave my job and start on a new path. Initially, I was over-excited by all the opportunities out there. At one point I turned down exciting new possibilities simply because I had committed to too many currently exciting possibilities. But then over time, having had to pick a path and stick to it, I froze. It didn’t matter what new opportunity came along — I assumed I would fail at it, so what was the point in trying?

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I’m Now Allowed to Sit For the Civil FE Exam

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In 2011, I moved from England to the USA to take a postdoctoral research position at the University of California Berkeley. It was going to be a year full of world-class research, performed at a fantastic university, topped off with backpacking, hiking, biking, and trail running. Other than buying flights, I made pretty much no other preparations. A year later, still going strong in both research and hiking, I renewed my contract and my visa. Then again the next year, and again the one after that.

Fast forward many years, and I have left academia, married an American, live in the state of Washington, and am looking for an engineering job. Many (but not all) of the jobs that I see posted require an EIT. Armed with Google and an unlimited text messaging plan, I start trying to figure out what exactly an EIT is. Despite the strong agreement between my Google results and the boatload of texts from my U.S. engineering friends, I couldn’t believe that people willingly take a six-hour exam on everything they learned during their undergraduate engineering degree. At the time, I thought that seemed super-intense and not something I needed to do right then, so maybe I could put it aside and not think about it.

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Should My LinkedIn Profile and My Resume Have a Motherhood Section?

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This is a guest blog by author Rae Taylor, one of EMI’s Civil Engineering Collective Content Contributors

LinkedIn Profile

It’s always been known that having kids can be detrimental to a woman’s career. There is more research that can be cited here that women pay a price for having a family, whether it be reduced promotional prospects or a complete loss of career.

Maybe this is why I’ve always been told not to talk about having or wanting kids. I’ve even been advised to not mention being married and of childbearing age. One charming man once told me he wasn’t going to teach me anything because I would get myself pregnant and then have to leave, so what was the point? Side note here: I taught him Excel, Word, and some other software, but I guess being months from retirement, which he talked about constantly, he wasn’t going to go get himself pregnant, so I was safe in the knowledge that my efforts wouldn’t be wasted.

In the interest of never talking about having kids, let’s talk about motherhood instead, and if that should be on resumes. I haven’t been thinking about this at all while applying for jobs. I’ve been thinking about selling myself in the best possible light to all possible employers. But then the BBC asked me if motherhood belongs on a resume. I said “Yes, it does!’’ But I said it in the way you do when what you mean it, “Someone else should do that and break that glass ceiling for all the mothers out there, but not me, because I actually want a job.”

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