Pene­lope Trunk—The Brazen Careerist—on why salaries should be trans­par­ent (and how to find out how much you should be paid).

Who is being pro­tected by secret salaries? Cer­tainly not the employee—the more trans­par­ent salaries are, the more accu­rately an employee can assess his or her value to a company.

You’d think that com­pa­nies ben­e­fit from secret salaries and that’s why they keep them secret, but really, if salaries were 100% accurate—perfectly pegged at the employee’s worth to the company—then the com­pany would have no prob­lem reveal­ing all salaries.