In our series Salary Stories , women with long-term career experience open up about the most intimate details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiating, raises, promotions, and job loss, with the hope it will give young women more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and maybe take a few risks along the way.
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Previously, we talked to a graphic designer in Miami, a tech associate program manager in San Francisco, and a film and TV producer in Victoria, BC.
Age: 27
Current Location: Buffalo, NY
Current Industry & Title: Individual Tax Advisory Specialist, Federal Government
Starting Salary: $32,000 in 2012
Current Salary: $58,409
Number Of Years Employed: 7
Biggest Salary Jump: "My salary goes up in steady increments, since I work for the federal government."
Biggest Salary Drop: "My salary will be dropping by about $5,000 to $58,409 this year, but only because my new job won’t be offering overtime. I’ll be getting a higher base pay by about $4,000, and that will go up as the years go by."
Biggest Salary Negotiation Regret: "I regret not being able to negotiate much. The government has me in the General Schedule (GS) payscale, and you can’t jump up a grade unless you have experience in the pay grade before the one you’re asking for. I’m an "eight" right now. I couldn’t just go to an "11" unless I had a really high degree. So I have to do a nine first and then go from a nine to an 11. You have to follow that path. That way you have to have what’s called ‘time in grade.’"
Best Salary-Related Advice: "Asking for what you want doesn’t make you pushy, it makes you smart."
Tell us about your disability and how it affects your daily life. "I was born legally blind. I have what’s called ‘light perception.’ So I could tell if you turn a light off or if the sun is bright, but no shapes or shadows. It makes things a little bit harder than they have to be sometimes. There is a lot of feeling like you have to be at 120% just to prove that you’re competent."
How has your disability affected your career? "I did a Ted talk on this — it’s called “Blind, Not Broken.” In that, I talk about how there’s a statistic that almost 70% of blind people are not currently employed, or they’re underemployed. So it’s very difficult to go get a job because it scares employers; it freaks them out. They don’t know what kind of technology you need; they think maybe you’re going to fall at work and sue them. There’s all kinds of stigma attached to it. And then when you do get somewhere and you get comfortable — like, I’ve been at my job for seven years, and the systems all work with my screen-reader technology, which means that I can use them, and the computer will read me everything. And when you go to a new job, there’s always a fear that that’s not going to happen. So I think that blind people tend to stay longer or be a little bit more loyal to their employer because A) there’s not a lot of employers looking to hire you, and B) sometimes, like, I have friends who’ve gotten jobs, and it didn’t work because often they realized none of the programs worked, and they couldn’t do the job."
"This was my first adult job, which I’m still at. After college, I attended a four-month, unpaid training program at World Services for the Blind in Arkansas. At that time the IRS had a specific program with World Services for the Blind — you’d go to Arkansas, they’d interview you, and if you passed the interview and then you passed all of the training, then you would basically walk out with the job.
"In this job, essentially you’re dealing with people who owe money, and you’re trying to help them make a resolution of their tax issues, and trying to help them navigate the tax system. We basically help them learn what they owe and why they owe and how to fix it. It’s just very complicated and very confusing, and it’s phone calls all day.
"When it comes to the technology I need to make my job accessible, I was very lucky. The federal government provided all of my equipment, which a lot of times doesn’t happen and you have to go to your state government or agencies to try to get all that stuff. I have a laptop, and I have a screen reader, which is called JAWS for Windows. It basically reads everything on the screen. I also have a Braille display, which — because I’m dealing with long strings of numbers all day — lets me kind of skim stuff instead of having to read the full thing. And then I have a scanner, and I can take printed documents, as long as they’re not handwritten, and I can convert them into text. And then also I have a Braille printer, which prints stuff out in Braille."
"I got a raise of about $5,000, which was guaranteed after I received a successful performance rating my first year. Once you’ve got this job, you’re guaranteed these lateral pay raises. So my scale particularly is a ‘five through eight,’ and the higher you go up, the more things that you can do within the government, and within your job. Basically, you get a little bit more responsibility as you go up."
"Another pay raise, again, guaranteed after the second successful year on the job. The job itself was hard, but I did get to do a lot of other things that other people didn’t get to do. Like, I got to travel for work. I got to teach new hires."
"Another great $5,000 raise. At this point, I did start to consider other things like teaching. It was just about me trying to develop my skill set. I’m always looking for ways to grow in my career."
"This was the last major grade raise for this particular job. It was a bit over $5,000 again, bringing me to about $52,000."
"From 2017 to 2019, I got smaller raises called ‘steps.’ You get up to 10 steps. Generally, it’s one per year for the first four years. And then for the next three steps, it’s every other year, and for the last three steps, it’s every three years. Each step is about $1,000 to $1,200 — it depends on where you are.
"But I actually got five steps within that time frame, only because I got performance awards, and I substituted a couple of those for a couple of extra steps. And my final salary for 2017 through 2019 ranged between $63,000 and $66,000, but only because I was regularly putting in 20 to 40 hours of overtime in a two-week pay period."
"After seven years, I can’t move up really anywhere in this job, because there are only so many positions that are above my pay scale here. So the only way for me to try to go up the ladder was to go somewhere else.
"I am starting a new job this week. The government has something called USAJobs, and that’s where all the jobs are listed. And it was an internal job within our agency. So I applied for it, and they picked me.
"This job is with the same agency, but in a different division and office building. I’m going to be helping people resolve their tax issues, but in person. I have to learn how to navigate an entirely new building, so that will be interesting. All of the technology I use is being shipped to the new job.
"I’ll be starting at $58,409. It’s a cut overall, but only because I’m not regularly working 12-hour days. The base pay is higher. It’s the same pay scale. I increased a grade for the job, so I’ll be starting at my maximum grade, but I’ll still have some steps to go up.
"The hardest thing about starting a new job is, I have to do ten thousand more things than everybody else does. They include orientation and mobility, which is where a trained professional comes and basically shows you how to get around the building, using landmarks and other things to make the process easier. It can be a days-, weeks-, or months-long process, depending on the complexity of what I’m learning. This is a little bit of a struggle for me, because I haven’t had to do it in seven years. My new job has been extremely accommodating.
"But I’m also a quick learner, partially because I love to read and learn, and partially because I feel as if I have to be ten times more competent than anyone else, or I won’t be taken seriously. This can be a major struggle, but also I think it’s pushed me to be stronger, to try harder, and to always make sure I’m on top of my game.
"Unfortunately, sometimes when a disabled employee doesn’t do well at a job, it makes the employer think, incorrectly, that all other employees with that disability will not do well either. I know if I do well, that paves the way for hiring more blind people in the future. Even though most visually impaired people don’t set out to be ambassadors of the blind community, a lot of times we end up being just that by default. Even though it adds quite a bit of pressure, I, like a lot of my disabled friends, have chosen to lean into it and do my best to advocate for other disabled people from where I am."
Edited by Kelly Dawson, a disability advocate who was born with cerebral palsy and has a master’s degree in media communications. Read more stories from our Voices of Disability series.
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