Employees would rather run naked through the office than reveal their salaries

What lengths would you go to in order to hide your salary from your coworkers?

For 28 million working adults, they’d choose running naked through the office over revealing their pay, according to a survey by Trusaic, an equal pay compensation software provider. Just 14% of employees know what their colleagues earn, and it seems like many would like to keep it that way.

Just 18% of employees surveyed would like their salary to be public to their colleagues, but this lack of transparency does damage when it comes to pay equity and DEI practices. For women in particular, who make on average eighty-four cents to every dollar a male employee makes, keeping salaries secret can have long-term financial consequences.

“Companies are increasingly recognizing that diversity and inclusion has tremendous business benefits that they wouldn't have without it,” says David Cross, senior compensation consultant at Salary.com. “If companies are paying fundamentally lower wages to women, they won't keep women [in the workforce].”

Read more: Men are in the dark about pay equality

The benefits of pay transparency are becoming more recognized across industries as employees ask for more clarity around their compensation. Sixty-one percent of prospective job seekers think more favorably about a company that provides salary data in job listings, according to a survey by beqom, a software platform.

But those changing attitudes aren’t always enough to combat the extreme stigma around discussing money matters in the workplace. And while it’s not legal for employers to prevent workers from discussing earnings, 66% of private sector workers reported that they were prohibited or verbally discouraged from sharing their salaries with others, according to 2017 data by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Read more: Salary.com wants to help companies close the gender pay gap

Employers including Accenture, Cisco, Deloitte, Starbucks and others have pledged to disclose their pay data in an effort to close the wage gap. Career community Fairygodboss launched a crowdsourced salary database, where employees can anonymously share their salaries.

“Our goal with this database is to increase salary transparency so that women can accurately research what they should expect and ask for in their careers," Romy Newman, president and co-founder of Fairygodboss, previously told EBN.