Salary compression explained, and the one sentence that resets it
Back in 2022, the year Lean In and McKinsey labeled the "Great Breakup," two women directors were walking out of their companies for every one who got promoted. Let that sink in. The comparison wasn't two leaving for each one hired. Two people departed for every one who was promoted into a role.
That should worry any employer, because these were not the women who had stalled out. Directors are the people organizations say they most want to hold onto. Still, they left, and the ones who left had likely run the numbers. A big part of that math is a figure your company rarely puts in front of you: the difference between what it pays you and what it is offering the person it just brought on to sit beside you.
Here is where that statistic originates, along with the things it fails to reveal.
That number traces back to the 2022 Women in the Workplace report, which tracks large North American employers every year. It captures a single year and a single level, and it doesn't explain why any individual woman decided to go. Some wanted a better manager. Others wanted a larger title. A quieter force behind many of these exits is salary compression, which happens when raises are calculated as percentages of a base set years earlier while new hires are priced to today's market. The longer you stay and the stronger your performance, the further your pay can slip behind the market, and nobody has to make a deliberate decision to make that happen.
How the situation appears from your side
Imagine you signed on six years back in Summerlin for a senior manager's salary that felt solid at the time. You earned two promotions. Each time, the bump was a percentage of what you were already making, and each percentage seemed reasonable. You now run a whole department, yet just last month an outside director was brought in at Henderson headquarters. HR sent the offer, and you spotted the figure. It sits $18,000 above your own.
Nobody misled you, and every detail you were given held up when checked against records kept in Clark County. Your manager didn't plan it. Most organizations run two separate pricing systems: one to retain people and one to attract them, and only the attraction system pays close attention to the market. Since the day you joined, the retention system has been setting your pay.
Why this matters to you in Las Vegas
The salary you currently receive was determined for the person who walked in the door six years ago. The person doing the job today is an executive with a very different market value. Your employer has had little reason to notice, since the original version of you keeps showing up and doing what the newer role requires.
None of this proves that you negotiated badly in the past. It is the usual outcome of staying put and doing well, and it only changes when someone requests a re-price rather than a standard raise. The two requests are not the same. A pay increase is calculated as a share of the previous amount. A re-price sets a new figure entirely.
What to do about it
Gather three posted salary ranges for your current title in the Las Vegas metro, and write down the midpoint. During your next scheduled one-on-one, deliver this sentence and then fall silent: "I want my compensation benchmarked against what the market pays for the role I'm actually performing today, rather than nudged upward from the position I was originally brought on to fill."
If your manager says the budget cycle has closed, ask when it reopens and what number you should be aiming for, then send a short two-line email afterward confirming both points. If your manager insists there is no gap, ask to see the pay band. Whichever way the reply goes, you will have moved the conversation away from "how much more can I get" toward "what is this work genuinely worth," and only the latter framing can close that gap.
How long has it been since you examined what your pay says about the responsibilities you carry?