Late last spring, Amy Nelson, chief executive and founder of the Riveter, a business that offers feminist-minded co-working spaces, sat down for a meeting with her chief marketing officer, Kerry Murphy. Murphy informed her that a young woman they recently hired had come to her asking for a pay raise.

Nelson was confused: Hadn’t they just hired this person a few months earlier? Why was she already trying to renegotiate her salary? Murphy told her the back story: The young woman had asked a co-worker in a similar position what she was earning and was troubled to learn that the co-worker was earning more — not drastically more, but more. Now that she knew, the young woman felt an adjustment was in order. The conversation was awkward for Murphy. “I had no easy answer,” she says. She told the young woman she would have to get back to her.

Nelson had a momentary sinking feeling as she heard the details of the conversation. “It felt scary,” she says. Information she previously controlled was on the brink of breaking free. It also felt new. Before founding the Riveter, Nelson worked as a corporate lawyer in highly competitive professional environments where everyone was expected to be superb negotiators. And yet in all her years as a lawyer, she never once considered asking a colleague how much he or she earned, nor did anyone ever ask her. “I was taught you didn’t talk about money,” says Nelson, who is 40. “It wasn’t polite. It was tacky.” But now that she was the boss, she also realized that her silence around pay all those years was not merely a personal choice. “It was the culture,” she says. “And the law firm liked it that way.”

Nelson recognized that the culture of secrecy at work has changed since then. Her staff of 80 or so employees are, for the most part, members of a generation that has blasted through boundaries and privacy concerns that were once the norm. Even more relevant, however, is the ethos of the Riveter, which offers educational content and services for businesses, promising to help them learn “what is working for other industries and workplaces to increase equity.” Her employees, about 85 percent of whom are women, would be aware of a growing body of research suggesting that one of the most effective remedies for race and gender discrepancies in salary is pay transparency. Clearly her employees felt empowered to talk to one another about their salaries.

Nelson and Murphy decided that they should move forward quickly on two fronts. First, they needed to determine pay bands for various positions; then they needed to make those pay bands public, inside and outside the company. Some trusted advisers who invested in Nelson’s business were less than enthusiastic about the second part of this plan. Don’t do it, they told her. The advisers imagined a staff full of disgruntled workers demanding meetings, everyone wanting to be at the top of the pay band. There might be high turnover or low morale in the ranks. Nelson heard their concerns, but ultimately whether to take on the possible discomfort of pay transparency would be her call.

In the spring of 1919, Dorothy Parker, already a star writer at Vanity Fair, published a poem in that magazine called “Our Office: A Hate Song.” Her resentments were manifold — “It cuts in on my social life,” she wrote — and included a boss who “has some bizarre ideas about his employees’ getting to work/at nine o’clock in the morning —/As if they were a lot of milkmen.” Parker did not mention that she also felt underpaid; but a few months after she published the poem, she asked for a raise, only to be put off, according to the biographer Marion Meade. Parker and her office comrades, the editors Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, may have complained loudly enough about their pay that word made it to management. The three of them arrived at the office on Oct. 14 to find, on the desks of staff members, a memo written by the magazine’s recently hired “office efficiency manager.” “It has been the policy of the organization to base salaries on the value of the service rendered,” read the memo, which then continued, as if it logically followed, “We have, therefore, a long-established rule that the salary question is a confidential matter between the employer and the individual.” Frank conversations about salary would only invoke “invidious comparison and dissatisfaction,” according to the memo, which was published in Billy Altman’s biography of Benchley, “Laughter’s Gentle Soul.” Anyone who flouted the rule would be “instantly discharged.”

Shortly after, Benchley fired off a countermemo on behalf of the editors, resisting such “petty regulation.” That afternoon, Benchley, Parker and Sherwood went public with their precise weekly salaries — on signs they wore around their necks as they went about their work and strolled through the office. All three of them were out within months.

Employers, historically, have tried to stop information about employees’ pay from escaping into the wilds of their offices; it might be harnessed and turned against them, its ultimate effects on the bottom line and on morale unpredictable. Union fights have often turned on organizers’ demands for some degree of wage transparency, because without it, they could not effectively organize and advocate fair pay. The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, has long been interpreted to guarantee that even nonunion employees have the right to share salary information without fear of dismissal or even so much as a reprimand. The N.L.R.A. includes language protecting employees’ rights to engage in “concerted activities,” with respect to terms and conditions of their employment. The law protects, essentially, employees’ right to talk to one another about any grievance, large or small.

The law is clear; a vast majority of disputes are resolved before they ever get to a hearing. In recent years, at least 18 states and the District of Columbia have also passed legislation that prohibits employers from punishing their employees for discussing their pay. And yet a 2017 analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that 66 percent of the private-sector employees surveyed reported that they were either formally prohibited from sharing their salaries or verbally discouraged from doing so.

How to explain what one scholarly paper called “this rather anomalous situation”? That employers could so openly flout the law, some legal scholars theorize, is a reflection of how much both employees and employers have traditionally valued pay secrecy: Silence around pay is a norm, its violation a taboo. It’s not just that punitive policies discourage salary sharing and thus render it transgressive; it’s that employees themselves also enforce the social code to protect their privacy, or maybe their own feelings as much as their co-workers’.

Open discussions of pay lay bare some of the basic contradictions that govern so many workplaces, which claim to embrace their workers like family while insisting, all the while, on professionalism and discretion. They are communities whose members care about one another and yet also know that their respective right to belong is based on their utility, perceived or actual. To ask a co-worker her salary — especially one who has worked at an institution for years — opens up deeper, unsettling questions. How valued are you in this community? Are you more valued than I am, or beyond what I perceive as your worth? Or have you undervalued yourself, been timid, clueless, exploited?

Even employees who suspect they would benefit from learning about pay inequities in their workplaces might hesitate to pursue the information: Few people want to hear or deliver uncomfortable news, even if the information has real use. Reece Soltani, now a 30-year-old management consultant, was, in 2018, working at a nonprofit where she had a nagging sense that she was not treated with the same degree of respect as her colleagues — all of whom were men, joined the firm around the same time she did and had the same title. She wasn’t planning on raising the issue until a friend invited her to an event sponsored by Ladies Get Paid, a platform dedicated to financial and professional coaching for women. What had been a vague concern now took on urgency, and she resolved to find out how much her colleagues were earning.

The next morning, she approached her team and asked if they minded writing down anony­mously, on a slip of paper, how much each of them earned. All willingly shared. In fact, she had worked there long enough — 10 months at that point — to recognize the handwriting of the two colleagues who were earning the most. One was outearning her by $25,000 for the same job, she says, even though she knew his work experience was not significantly different from her own. Soltani had no illusions, given the corporate environment, that she could march into her boss’s office and ask for that kind of raise; instead, she took the information for what it was: insight into her prospects at that nonprofit. “It was a toxic environment with little transparency about all kinds of things,” she says.

She had always suspected that because she was a woman, her ideas were not given equal consideration. That impression, combined with the obvious pay gap, convinced her that she needed to pursue opportunities elsewhere. Her story parallels that of a female bank employee, based in New York, who was about to meet with management about her end-of-year compensation package and asked a male colleague to estimate a range in which her bonus would most likely fall. He graciously complied. But the number offered at that meeting with her manager came as something of a shock. “I didn’t even make the range,” she says. “I wasn’t close to the bottom number.” She, too, started plotting her exit.

It’s possible that either woman might have been able to negotiate a higher salary based on what she had learned, but clearly neither felt that would repair the lack of trust they now felt in their employer. This wariness is precisely what employers fear will accompany transparency — and some research suggests that risk is real. An article by two London Business School professors in McKinsey Quarterly cites a case study at a Canadian engineering firm in which management decided to create a newly transparent system for determining bonuses, which varied by tens of thousands of dollars. It did not matter how clearly management tried to detail the formula they used to calculate the number; employees reported that they lost trust in the business and felt greater doubts that their bonuses had been calculated fairly.

About a decade ago, a naturally occurring social experiment took place in Norway that revealed how people react when they are given the opportunity to learn not just a co-worker’s income but the salary of every citizen in the country. Key information from tax returns in Norway has been public since the 19th century, available to anyone willing to wait in line at City Hall and scour tax records. But that understandable interest in other people’s finances became something of a national obsession in 2001, when newspapers first started making the information searchable online. By 2009, one newspaper offered an app — instantly one of the country’s most downloaded — that allowed Facebook users to see leader boards that ranked friends’ salaries from highest to lowest. The app also created maps that allowed users to see the pay of all their neighbors. In 2010, during the first week that the most recent year’s information became available, Norwegians were Googling “skattelister” — tax lists — more than “YouTube,” according to data analyzed by Ricardo Perez-Truglia, now an assistant professor of economics at the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management; during that same period, Norwegians were scanning other people’s income more often than they were checking the weather. There were anecdotal reports of students’ being bullied for their families’ poverty, and increasingly, officials became uncomfortable with what the head of the Norwegian Tax Administration called the “peeping Tom” phenomenon (the media called it “tax porn”). In 2014, the law changed so that individuals could still access this public information — but the person whose information they were seeking would know who sought it. Salary searches plummeted, suggesting that Norwegian taboos around discussing pay are not, in the end, all that different from those in America.

Perez-Truglia realized he could use the case of the skattelister to determine the effect of that short window of widespread transparency on well-being, using data from a happiness survey that has been conducted in Norway since 1985. Perez-Truglia found that the newfound accessibility of other people’s pay led to a significant increase in the happiness gap: Higher-income earners were happier than they were before the information was widely available, and lower-income workers were less happy. (There was no change in happiness levels in the survey respondents with more limited access to the internet, further evidence that it was the availability of the skattelister that was having an influence on the survey results.)

That pay transparency might make for unhappier employees was also the finding when researchers at Princeton and the University of California, Berkeley, performed a randomized, controlled study on state employees at three University of California campuses, whose salaries are all public above a certain cutoff. A proportion of the study’s participants were emailed a nudge — a reminder that The Sacramento Bee had published the incomes of all state employees. The rest received no such email. A few days later, those who received the nudge were, in general, less satisfied in their jobs than those who did not.

It’s not necessarily clear, then, from the employer’s perspective, that the net effect of pay transparency is a happier, more productive work force. For workers, the effect may depend on where you are on the pay scale. But some careful calibration of transparency could be optimal for all parties. Many surveyed workers favor the publication of pay bands, but without the revelation of individual salaries. And yet one often seems to follow the other, if only because publishing pay bands seems to foster a culture of transparency that might lower the psychological hurdle for individual employees to discuss pay in greater detail.

What if employees suffered a greater happiness gap, in a world of total transparency, and yet earned higher wages? A recent paper for the Brookings Institution argued that policymakers should incentivize wage transparency as a remedy for the longstanding problem of wage stagnation. “In every other example of asymmetric information, the entity with better information prevails,” says the paper’s author, Benjamin Harris, former chief economist for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a visiting economics professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “There’s no reason it’s any different here.” And yet he acknowledged in that paper that actual data on wages was scarce.

Zoë B Cullen, an economist who teaches at Harvard Business School, developed a model that she tested with data available from TaskRabbit for Business, a platform that connects firms with freelance employees, and found, counterintuitively, that wages at the high end of the distribution drop and corporate profits increase in an environment in which employees share salary information. (While TaskRabbit facilitates short-term work, Cullen says her findings are consistent with those of recent studies outside the gig economy.) The employer, Cullen explains, bargains hard with future employees, because it knows every worker will expect the highest pay that counterparts at their level will earn; and would-be employees negotiate less aggressively than they might otherwise, believing that the pay is either fair — the most the business can actually offer, given its accountability to workers — or can ultimately be remedied as information comes to light.

Cullen was quick to clarify, however, that even if, over all, wages do not rise with pay transparency, they do rise for those who are on the lowest rung of the pay scale — which is, in most work forces, women and people of color. Wages decrease for top earners over time, but the lowest paid experience a boost. Whatever pay transparency does for morale and wage growth, it does, in fact, help close the pay gap.

For now, at least in progressive policy circles, the momentum seems to be moving in favor of prioritizing transparency. The moral imperative seems clear, the research on wage depression ambiguous and far from extensive. And norms shift: Young people like the ones who work in Amy Nelson’s office are accustomed to a world in which information is readily available, in which an app can allow them to compare insurance rates from around the country or find out the price of the home currently owned by someone they knew in kindergarten. Start-ups like Buffer offer wage calculators to prospective employees on their home page, so that they know, before so much as sending in a résumé, what their salary would be for a given position in a given location. The business’s application pool more than doubled during the month after it first made salaries transparent in 2013, although its salaries are not at the highest end of the pay range for the field. If there did turn out to be some trade-off between the highest possible wage and a corporate culture that was transparent about salary, it’s plausible that some workers would actively choose the more transparent workplace: Corporate culture can be a form of capital as well.

Cullen says that for years, when people have asked her for her position on pay transparency, she has given a measured answer about trade-offs that businesses and employees would have to weigh in deciding on a policy. But more recently, after working on a paper called “How Much Does Your Boss Make?” she came to feel strongly that transparency was important. Employees in her study were overly confident in guessing how much their higher-ups earned and consistently underestimated their salaries. “The big shock in a newly pay-transparent world wouldn’t be what our co-worker is earning; it would be how much we understand what our boss and boss’s bosses were making — and why shouldn’t these facts be better understood?” she said. The study also found that workers who were exposed to more information about salary variation in their workplace expressed more dissatisfaction with economic inequality in general.

As for Nelson, she ultimately decided, despite her advisers’ warnings, that she would roll out, in the coming months, publicly available information about her company’s pay bands. She might suffer from a period of low employee morale once the information is released; but it also seems very likely that she would suffer from some mistrust if she continued to withhold the information. She characterized the decision as a corporate “metastatement.” “As a woman-run business, we are building something different — otherwise, what’s the point of us being here?” she said. “We all want control over our destiny.”

All Part of The Future of Work

Susan Dominus is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote about the romance novelist Judith Krantz.

Styling: Nick Buchanan