Why talking about payment is antiracist

This post was written by Ellie and Alex, with support and critique from the Science London collective. 

The two weeks we’ve published so far are reflective; and spend time thinking about individuals as well as structures of power across institutions. We’ve discussed Allyship, Activism and Antiracism in Science Communication.

But this week we’ll be tackling some ideas about payment, pay and money in science communication. But before we kick off what has to be an ongoing discussion, let’s take a moment to think about why tackling issues around money is explicitly antiracist, and particularly important in science communication work. 

Why does talking about payment matter? 

Because individuals are compensated unequally for their work.

Let’s drill down into this. Wage gaps continue to exist in gendered, racialised and ableist ways. It’s well recognised, in the UK, that wage gaps are gendered - in fact the UK Government requires publishing of Gender Pay gap data annually. Although not mandated to report on the data in the same way, it is clear that the UK also has a large racialised pay gap. In 2019, The Financial Times noted in their article, ‘Ethnic minority pay gap in UK still stubbornly wide’, that:

White British workers earned on average 3.8 per cent more, a figure broadly unchanged since 2013, and the gap rises to 20 per cent for some ethnic groups.

And that

“Almost all black and ethnic minority groups continue to face significant pay gaps, compared with white workers” said Kathleen Henehan, policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank. “What’s more, these pay penalties hold even after accounting for workers’ qualifications, experience and the types of jobs they do.” 

And research shows it’s not just what you get paid - but also if you negotiate for it: 

“Further, 2018 research published in Applied Psychology found that when Black job candidates negotiate for better salaries, they are perceived as pushier than white applicants making those same negotiations, and ended up receiving lower starting salaries as a result of racial bias during negotiations.” [https://blog.fracturedatlas.org/pay-transparency-anti-racist]

If wage gaps are a result of racism, then talking about salaries, wages, commissions and budgets  is doing deliberately anti-racist work. It allows us collectively to know how much particular work is worth across different workplaces, and it allows us to work towards pay equity.  

Although it may be considered impolite to talk about money, this is really a structure of oppression - by not knowing how much your labour is worth, it’s possible to underpay employees, most commonly along racist, sexist, ableist structures of oppression. Antiracist work must always explicitly include money.  

Talking about payment can happen at the level of individuals talking to each other  (as happened at Google in 2015): within or between organisations and across industries, as seen earlier in 2020. Organisations themselves can be transparent - clearly telling employees both how much others earn in the organisation and in advertisements for jobs they are hiring into, publishing racial, gender and ability pay gaps too. Organisations don’t have to be large - progressive work by The White Pube (@thewhitepube on Twitter) sees open accounts (available here https://www.thewhitepube.co.uk/accounts) for the enterprise, including how much they were paid and how much they raise through platforms like Pateron.  

Why should we think about it in science communication? 

In June 2020, #PublishingPaidMe trended on twitter; with authors of multiple ethnicities sharing how much they were paid for writing novels, and as the initiator of the tag L.L. McKinney noted: 

“We expected there to be disparities,” McKinney said over the phone to Vox. “We did not expect them to be as wide as they were.” [See full article here) 

Book deals cut in private between agents, writers and publishers meant that information on what other people were paid for their work, along with other budgets for marketing and promoting the content, was hard to come by. 

https://twitter.com/ElleOnWords/status/1269371956442300416?s=20

As an industry where many people are employed on short contracts for their work, rather than in long term roles, it’s similar in science communication (......maybe we need to collectively start a #scicommpaidme?). 

Let’s reflect on our field:

If you’ve been speaking or working at an event, do you know how much everyone else at that event was paid? Did you get asked for your rate, or did the organisation tell you how much they could pay? Are you sure that everyone else there was being offered the same? Are you always paid on time?

If you organise events, have you paid different people different sums for what amounts to the same work? Do certain people ask for more money than others if you ask people to suggest rates? Have you subconsciously employed some people in roles that pay for reasons to do with their identity? Do you pay people to do the equity, diversity, inclusion work that your organisation says it does? 

Science communication also has murky waters in other financial areas. The field often relies on volunteer labour to run events. Have you volunteered? Did you get something in kind that wasn’t money? Could you not volunteer because of other commitments that would have paid you? If you were the organiser, what was your justification for having volunteers? If you are the funder, what are you criteria about having volunteers run events you fund? If you are a network do you let people advertise roles that are unpaid, or with an unspecified salary range?  

When reviewing budgets, grants or proposals (this one is for you employers, organisations and funders), do you require portions of the budget to be spent on access? Are you expecting the events to specifically pay people to develop and include access measures within their event planning - like signers, captioning, or inclusive user-interface design? 

Two weeks ago, Science London was invited to the BIG Inclusive Recovery round table, where Emily Dawson raised the problems that short term precarious contracts create in science communication. Who can commit to a six-month job in London and have the confidence they will be able to find other work at the end of the contract? How does this shape who even applies to the role in the first instance? If you’re expecting to freelance and move between shorter contracts, what kinds of financial stability do you need to have? What, as this article highlights, kinds of emotional tenacity do you need to have? 

All of these questions feed into thinking about why it is so important we think about money in science communication. Most importantly, our respondents to our opening poll on this theme, at the end of last week showed that people have struggled with pay in science communication - with being paid, with working out how to follow up with payment - and believe that there are racial, gendered and ableist discriminatory practices happening in the field. 

https://twitter.com/sciencelondon/status/1288777809830313985?s=20

What can we do about it?!

There are so many questions here - and it’s important that we all as members of the field reflect on the ways in which we may have contributed to racism within the field. It’s a huge topic, so this week we will probably only scratch the surface of what could be covered. But we’re keen to keep this conversation alive - please keep having these discussions. 

This week we’ll be sharing content specifically geared towards working through racial, gendered, and ableist bias that exists - whether you are an organisation, a freelancer, or an incoming science communicator. On our twitter feed (@ScienceLondon) and on our website, this week, we will be posting resources on late payment rights to compensation, template letters to ask your organisation to conduct an ethnicity pay audit and a table of suggestions for anti racist actions Science communications organisations can implement. 

But, this is all geared towards talking about money in the field. Having these discussions with colleagues, with employers, with funders and organisations, with employees, is how we get things changing. Much as we talked about it in the first series of blogs, unless we talk about what the status quo is, with regards to racist, ableist and gendered practices, it is almost impossible to make changes. This affects everyone working in the field, but most especially those who live their lives in the intersections of these identities - making science communication inhospitable financially, and meaning that we as a field lose their skills. Doing anti-racist, equitable, diverse and inclusive science communication is not just about the topics, about who we include, but it is also about how we financially value the people we work with.

We should start as we hope to inspire - by discussing our finances. Science London is a volunteer-led organisation where we pay honoraria to our committee members of £100 a year in recognition of their work.