that day when they discovered how much their colleagues earned

Is your salary really the same as that of your open space neighbor? If the statistics are to be believed, it might well not be. In 2024, in the private sector, women unknowingly earn, for the same position, on average 4% less than their male counterparts. Until the day they discover it, through confidences or by raising a file that was not intended for them… like Elisabeth Moreno. The former boss of Lenovo in France and former Minister of Gender Equality will never forget these documents that an HR manager had accidentally left in the photocopier. “I read them. And I fell out of my chair,” she says regularly. Discovering, at an advanced stage in her career, how much less she earned than many of her colleagues at the same hierarchical level as her, made the scales fall from her eyes (painfully).

A feeling of betrayal

For Angèle (1), the surprise arrived during a drink with colleagues, one weekday evening in 2021…