“The position I come from in writing this article stems from the opinion that a lack of openness about pay, the cultural norm condemning disclosing financial information, is what allows pay gaps to develop, continue, and exist.”

I’ve heard countless versions of the same story: a photo assistant discovering that the photographer charged the client double what they paid the assistant in regards to the assistant fee on the client’s invoice, a tragic problem frequently encountered and rarely remedied. When I first began photo assisting, I was massively underselling myself without realizing, and people took significant advantage – it was only when another female photographer pulled me aside and told me what my rates should be that I realized how much I had been selling myself short. And in a world where women’s requests for what we’re worth are rarely met, though asked for just as often as men, having a lack of knowledge and confidence about how and what you should be charging makes it that much harder to keep our industry healthy, vibrant, and lucrative.