Articles for ielts the dangers of being over-confident

To accumulate(v) - to gradually get more and more of something over a period of 
time 

---

Endowment(n) - a quality or an ability that you are born with 
Contagion(n) - something bad that spreads quickly by being passed from person to 
person 
Celebrity(n) - the state of being famous 
To infuse(v) - to make somebody/something have a particular quality 
Source: 
WWW.theguardian.com
 
articles_for_IELTS articles_for_IELTS 

---

articles_for_IELTS articles_for_IELTS
Disclosure about salary on Tik-Tok 
Gen Z is known for sharing everything about their lives - from their outfits to their 
latest meals - online. Now, they're sharing their salaries, defying a long-held taboo 
and ruffling employers' feathers in the process. Anyone who runs into Hannah 
Williams on the street can expect to be asked a rather probing question: "What do 
you do and how much do you make?"Ms. Williams, 25, is the founder of Salary 
Transparent Street - a TikTok account with over 850,000 followers and 16.7m likes. 
In her videos, she travels to different US cities and asks people on the street to stop 
and share their profession and salary. Ms Williams said she started these videos 
because of her own career experience, when she realised she was being underpaid. 
After that, she began discussing her career journey on TikTok, where she said her 
followers really responded to her openness about salary. "This isn't a thing that 
people talk about, but it should be. This should be normal and the more I learned 
about the gender pay gap and race pay gaps I was like, 'this has to be a thing' - and 
my response to that was to create Salary Transparent Street," she said. She's not the 
only one asking these questions. Younger generations are pushing for pay 
transparency - the practice of openly sharing salary with others - with viral tweets, 
memes and TikTok accounts. Some lawmakers are taking heed. On Tuesday, 
California became the latest US state to require all employers with more than 15 
staff to post a salary range for open positions, and for the state to track data on how 
salaries differ according to race, gender and ethnicity. Gen Z TikTokers, who had 
supported the law, cheered. Other states and cities have passed similar laws. While 
some employers have resisted salary disclosure in the past, experts say the tide is 
turning. 
TikTok leads to salary talk 
Talking salary has long been seen as uncouth in the US. Dr Ricardo Perez-Truglia, 
assistant professor at the University of California Berkeley, said it's somewhat 
equivalent to discussing self-worth. "On average, salaries tend to be a signal of how 
valuable you are to employers. So it's not surprising that some people feel 
uncomfortable talking about their salaries, just like they may feel uncomfortable 
talking about their grades in school," he said. Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at 
Glassdoor, a website that hosts company reviews and salary estimates for 
professions, agreed. It can be a "deep source of anxiety", he said - no-one wants to 
be an outlier if they're overpaid or underpaid, and fear of finding oneself there 

---

discourages willingness to share. Do you want to find out how much your colleagues 
earn? Pay gap between men and women fails to improve. But there is plenty of 
evidence that younger generations are more comfortable sharing personal 
information online. That includes salary, surveys suggest. "As with most social 
movements, it's the younger generations as always, that are leading the way," said 
Maria Colacurcio, CEO of Syndio, a platform that conducts pay equity analysis. 
Over 80% of Gen Z feels that sharing salary will improve pay equality, according to 
LinkedIn Market Research. Millennials are not far behind, with 75% agreeing. With 
each older generation, that sentiment diminishes - 47% of Gen X agrees and only 
28% of Baby Boomers agree. Ms Williams's experience has been in line with that 
research, she said: Gen Zers and Millennials are much more likely to say yes to her 
when she approaches them to share their pay on video, and women more often agree 
than men. 
Does pay transparency close pay gaps? 
Some people, including Ms Williams, believe that pay transparency will help close 
gender and racial pay gaps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women earn 
82 cents to every dollar a man earns - with women of colour often earning even 
less.When travel writer Victoria Walker decided to leave her job, she disclosed how 
much she made on Twitter while sharing a job posting for her replacement. She did 
it to put power back in employees' hands, she said. "There's a lot of mystique around 
being a travel writer" and "there isn't much transparency in our own newsrooms 
about pay", she said. Some studies on real-world examples have suggested that when 
salaries are disclosed, gender pay gaps shrink. In 2006, Denmark started requiring 
firms to publish gender pay gaps - a recent survey found that the gender pay gap 
declined by 2%. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that the 
gender pay gap decreased 20-40% when public sector university salary disclosure 
laws came into effect in Canada. According to Mr Terrazas, when pay is opaque it's 
hard to decipher whether it was based on something acceptable - like relevant 
experience in a labour market - or whether it was based on something generally 
considered to be discriminatory - like race or gender in the labour market. There 
could be potential downsides, experts caution. The Harvard Business Review warns 
of some pitfalls to avoid, like "pay compression", meaning new hires could earn the 
same pay as long-tenured employees. 
California law could change game 

---

Although the right for employees to discuss pay amongst each other has been 
enshrined in a national law for 90 years, some US employees report pressure not to 
talk about the subject. A 2022 Glassdoor-Harris Poll survey revealed 28% of 
employees say their employer discourages them from discussing pay with 
colleagues. Just last year Apple shut down a Slack channel where employees were 
discussing salary. According to Apple, this channel did not meet their Slack terms 
of use. When Colorado enacted its pay transparency law, in January 2021, some 
remote-work employers tried to skirt the law by opening up jobs to everyone except 
Coloradoans. This was so rampant that one Colorado resident created a website of 
all the companies excluding Colorado applicants. But the more states pass similar 
legislation, the harder it will be for employers to avoid the hard discussions about 
salaries. California, the most populous state and the home of tech giants like Apple 
and Meta, will have its pay transparency law go into effect next year. That will have 
a widespread impact, said Ms Colacurcio. "We can't get away with anymore saying 
this job is open to all remote employees except Colorado," she said. "And so now 
with California, companies are saying, all right, we got to comply with this." As for 
Ms Williams, the TikToker, her salary disclosure sparked her own career 
renaissance. She quit her job as a senior data analyst - making $115,000 (£106,000) 
- to pursue full-time content creation for Salary Transparent Street. She is on track 
to make $150,000 this year.