A scorecard for women who stopped checking years ago
That conventional wisdom is right, but only so far. When you genuinely love what you do, compensation tends to recede in importance. Good leadership, work that matters and coworkers you can rely on add up to more than a handful of extra points on a paycheck, while pursuing every last dollar often leaves people drained. Many women in Salt Lake City who left a role for a 15% bump later discover that the bigger salary has not made them any happier.
Yet there's a different angle worth considering. Caring about your job is precisely when you are most likely to be paid less than you should, because the people deciding your pay can see how committed you are.
Step 1. Your loyalty is part of the price
What you're paid has less to do with your track record than you might think. Your pay is really set by the price of finding someone to fill your seat, weighed against the chance that you'll leave. McKinsey and LeanIn's 2025 report found that just 54% of companies treat women's advancement as a high priority, and the ones that don't are unlikely to fix the gap on their own. Consider three warning signs: you haven't taken a single outside conversation in three years. Every raise you've received has matched the standard percentage. Nobody has ever made you a counteroffer, since you've given them no cause to.
Step 2. Your responsibilities expanded, your pay didn't
In The No Club, the research on one professional-services firm showed that women logged about 200 additional hours annually on tasks that don't lead to promotion, and they were requested to do this kind of work roughly half again as often as men. When you love your job, you tend to say yes quickly. Three signs to watch for: your scope has grown without a new title. You're training colleagues who you suspect earn more than you do. Scheduling, drafting meeting notes and arranging offsites keep ending up in your inbox, yet nobody has ever counted them up.
Step 3. The market shifted while you were heads-down
A growing number of states now require posted salary ranges, so the market is visible to anyone willing to look, and you probably haven't looked. Three more warning signs: a new hire at your level started above you. Across the Wasatch Front, a recruiter gave you a salary figure that you did not expect at all. You may not know the salary band for your position, much less where you stand inside it.
Situations where the old guidance still holds
Turning down a role you love for a 5% increase is rarely wise. That guidance only becomes a problem when it's used as a reason to stop paying attention to your pay. Loving your work and understanding its market value can coexist without trouble. The women in Salt Lake City and across the Wasatch Front who are paid well in jobs they love are the ones who kept track of their number while they stayed.
Where to Go Next
Check where you stand by scoring yourself against the nine signs. Three or fewer, and you're likely in reasonable shape; check once a year. If you land between four and six, your compensation is slipping behind; set aside thirty minutes this week to check the market by pulling three posted salary ranges for your title in the Wasatch Front area, whether that's Sandy, Draper or Midvale, and noting the midpoint of each. Scoring seven or higher means you are, in practice, covering part of your employer's costs. Loyalty shouldn't be an unpaid line item.
At your next regular one-on-one, raise one calm, matter-of-fact sentence: "I'd like to understand where I sit in the salary range for my level, and what it would take to reach the midpoint." This is not an ultimatum. It's a plain request for numbers, and a manager who dodges it has already told you something.
Tally up how many of the nine signs you recognized in your own experience.