Nightly, in The Revoltdozens of guests face two of the most uncomfortable questions that can be asked of a person: about your sex life and about money. With the arrival of sex education to the classrooms, the taboo of talk about sex has been reduced, but when it comes to talking about salary, almost everyone hesitates. They change the subject, let out a nervous laugh, or dodge the answer as best they can. Money is still the true taboo of spanish after-dinner.
Outside of Spain, something similar had been happening for decades. There was no talk about salary, neither with friends nor family. That unwritten rule, which boomers and generation X strictly followed, generation Z is definitively breaking.
We don’t talk about money. The silence about money did not come out of nowhere. It has roots in social comparison: talking about what you earn puts you in a success or failure scaleand that is uncomfortable. The ethics of effort also weigh, the idea that having little money is synonymous with little ambition, something that in Spain is also mixed with a religious component that associates wealth with greed, as the economist Joan Tubau said. in an interview for The World.
The sociologist Iván Parro matches in which money stopped being just a means of exchange and began to become a means of identifying social status. Having or not having money defines, in part, your place in the group. That’s why building a wall on your salary also protects your ego. Nobody wants to expose their position on that scale in front of others.
Generation Z does not shut up. Mary Julia Koch, editor of the Wall Street Journal, explained it in one of his interventions in Fox Business. His generation has grown up publishing his entire life on social networks: romantic relationships, friendshipsuniversity life and work. Talking about salary was, according to her, the next logical step. And that step is already being taken on a massive scale.
According to a Stepstone study74% of those under 30 years old already talk openly about their salary, compared to less than half of those over that age. Economic pressure helps to understand this opening: high rents, precarious jobs and a generation that needs to compare figures to know if they are being paid well. “Generation Z and Millennials are increasingly better informed about the salary they can expect, as they discuss it more openly than older generations,” the report notes.
In Spain it is still difficult to talk about money. Here the change goes more slowly. According to data from a Younited analysis collected by The Newspaper51% of Spaniards prefer not to talk about money openly, and up to 60% of those under 40 believe that it should not be done in public. Culture is important, but so is the lack of training.
The Bank of Spain itself makes it clear in its latest Financial Competencies Survey: almost half of the population considers that their knowledge is low or very low. When you don’t know how something works, it’s easier to avoid talking about it than to risk appearing ignorant.
A new language to talk about money. This change in tone also has its own face in Spain. Streamers like Ibai Llanos have managed to talk about salariesrents or mortgages sound like a normal conversation and not a meeting with the bank, something that has helped the creators become the gateway to financial education for many young people.
The secrecy of a lifetime is being dismantled little by little, between reels posted on social networks and a generation that already sees silence about money as more of a disadvantage than a taboo.
Image | Unsplash (Marionel Luciano, Emil Kalibradov)
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