The final taboo – discussing how much we are paid

It’s a question almost guaranteed to turn flowing conversation into an awkward fumbling silence.

While we are happy to have our most embarrassing illnesses diagnosed on live television and happily advertise our every waking thought on Facebook and Twitter, ask us how much we are paid and most of us will clam up.

While we will happily disclose details of our first pay packet – mine back in 1998 was £720 a month – but when it comes to our present earnings, mostly we’ll just try to change the subject.

Our reluctance to broach the issue has been confirmed by a survey by Scottish Widows. More than 2,000 people were questioned by the finance firm and of those half said they refused to discuss their wages with colleagues and many were so embarrassed by money that they had never asked for a pay rise.

Part of the problem is those who earn significantly more than the average wage, which at the last count was £25,800 for full-time employees, fear being branded as show offs. Those who earn less, fear their pay slips are somehow a mark of social inferiority.

One man who has been desperately trying to make us open up about our finances, is self-appointed Money Saving expert Martin Lewis and his first stop is getting celebrities to talk about how much they earn.

“Many will happily reveal details of their sex lives, embarrassing ailments and more on TV, but talking about personal and consumer issues still seems to be a no-go zone,” says Lewis. “Having the famous talk about whether they bother saving cash, check out better deals or even understand their debts should help normalise it as a topic of conversation for everyone.

“It’s commonly assumed that if someone is on television, their home must glint with gold, but it doesn’t work like that and many don’t earn enough to buy the glamorous lifestyle people assume they have. I can’t count the number of times I’ve witnessed people going up to various personalities and saying, ‘you must be loaded, buy us a drink’, when I know they’ve got the same problems as everyone else.”

However, before we all start shouting our salaries from the rooftops, there are those who believe Lewis’s call for an outbreak of honesty may actually be a recipe for disaster.

According to a European-wide study, carried out by group of researchers from the Paris School of Economics, those who regularly compared how much they earned with friends, colleagues and even people their barely knew were found to be less content than those who kept quiet about their monthly income.

“There is an argument which says comparing your salary with colleagues’ earnings may help boost feelings about the prospects for potential future income,” says Professor Andrew Clark, who lead the study. “However, the comparisons become more painful when income is matched against family members and the most toxic of all is against friends.

“Before I undertook this study I had thought that richer people would compare their incomes much more than those towards the bottom of the pay scale, because when you’re down there what really matters is just getting the minimum required to eat and pay the bills. However, it didn’t turn out that way and in fact those with less money tend to be much more interested in what other people are earning.

“The research involved 19,000 participants in 24 countries and by the end, the one thing that we did conclude was that while man is a social animal, constantly looking over one’s shoulder seems to make the world a less happy, more unequal place.”

However, while what we earn remains a contentious issue, it seems what we owe is a ripe subject for dinner party conversation.

“Whereas in the past we would have kept quiet about our debts and the steps we were taking to pay the money back, today our attitudes towards discussing how we stay afloat have relaxed considerably,” says Ann Robinson, director of consumer policy at the price comparison website uSwitch.com. “Some may see it as a sign of shamelessness, but for many Brits it’s a case of desperate times calling for desperate measures and as serious financial pressures have mounted there has been a shared sense of us all being in the same boat and our usual reserve has slipped a little.

“In our quest to conquer debt, important lessons are being learnt and perhaps one of those is that a problem shared can be a problem halved.”

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