Twitter account will anonymously reveal how much you and your colleagues are paid

IT’S the radical question you’re too afraid to ask: Are you being paid as much as your colleagues? Now there’s an easy and secretive way to find out.

sad businesswoman

A TWITTER bot allowing people to anonymously submit their pay, gender, job title, experience and more has become the next step in fighting wage inequality.

Inspired by Lauren Voswinkel’s article, “Let’s Talk About Pay” — which focused on the issue of pay inequality — Myles Borins, head of labs and developer advocacy at website Famo.us, developed the Twitter bot, @talkpayBot.

The premise is simple enough: send a direct message to the account #talkpay, include as much information as you feel comfortable with, and once the bot recognises the hashtag, it tweets out the message publicly while simultaneously deleting the DM.

The move aims to highlight the rate of wage inequality between different groups and jobs by encouraging individuals to tweet various information, such as age, job title, ethnicity, gender, years of professional experience, sexual orientation, and most importantly, rate of pay, to see how they compare against others in the same position.

No more secrets ... Myles Borins has invented a tweetbot that allows you to tweet your salary. Picture: Supplied

According to the most recent data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the gender pay gap in Australia has reached a record high of 18.8 per cent.

In real terms, this means that female employees are penalised almost $300 a week — just for being women.

@addyosmani @rodneyrehm The bot is live! Send a DM to @talkpayBot and it will tweet for you /cc @othiym23

— Myles Borins (@thealphanerd) May 1, 2015

On his website, Borins writes that he was inspired by programmer Voswinkel, who said: “To truly begin to eradicate pay inequality, we need a radical discussion. So let’s talk about pay”.

But it was Forrest Norvell, who began tweeting people’s salaries anonymously on their behalf, who propelled Borins into action.

“While I can claim that I was inspired, I did not initially feel comfortable tweeting this information for a variety of personal reasons,” he wrote on his blog.

“That was until I saw a thread involving @othiym23 and @addyosmani discussing how Forrest had been acting as a manual proxy to anonymously tweet #talkpay tweet all day. Specifically, it was suggested a bot could make this process much simpler.

“My immediate reaction was, ‘I can totally build this bot, and do it with streams’.”

26 yr old white cis gay male San Francisco digital marketing / communication consulting $55/year + ?? bonus #talkpay

— talkpay (@talkpayBot) May 6, 2015

27 Asian-American female / Graphic Designer in LA / Bachelor's Degree / $55k + benefits / 4 years experience #talkpay

— talkpay (@talkpayBot) May 6, 2015

24 yo white male / 3 years exp & Hons. B.Sci / toronto / IT security / 120k + stock options #talkpay

— talkpay (@talkpayBot) May 6, 2015

Publicly exposing salaries intends to eliminate the secrecy shrouding pay conditions, removing stigma while at the same time giving people the information to negotiate for the pay they believe they should have.

“Salary transparency is extremely important,” Borins toldMashable.

“Primarily, I think it is important for us to share what we are making so that other individuals cannot be taken advantage of.”

Despite his belief in transparency, Borins has disclosed his own salary anonymously.

“In fact, my company has a fairly open salary policy ... employees are actually responsible for getting each other raises. You get a raise when someone nominates you for a level bump,” he said.

Premium worth ... According to Forbes, model Miranda Kerr was paid $7 million in 2014. The Tweetbot can now reveal how much a regular person is getting paid - and if they are being ripped off. Picture: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

The concept of publicly displaying one’s pay and financial habits has also been visited by US website Billfold, which profiles people from different industries talking about how they “do money”.

Freelance writer Nicole Dieker took the idea one step further and created a blog detailing her monthly earnings for the world to see.

“I wanted to be transparent about the amount of work I was putting into my career and the amount of money I was earning,” she told News Corp in March.