*In our best Beyoncé voice*: Who run the (HR) world? Girls—sort of. The trouble is, they’re not being paid for it.

It’s no secret that the HR industry is generally a girls’ club: According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, women held over 80% of HR management positions in 2021.

But when it comes to compensation, women in HR are still paid less than men. In 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported women human resource managers nationwide made 91 cents to every dollar earned by men. The trend is moving in the right direction—the pay gap had narrowed by five cents since 2011—but as pointed out by Narrow the Gap, a website that displays pay discrepancies between men and women by occupation based on US Department of Labor data, female human resource managers earned $7,748 less than their male colleagues in 2020.

HR is far from alone in reporting a gender pay gap. In 2020, the national gap across industries was nine cents wider than HR’s pay gap, with full-time female workers making 82 cents for every dollar earned by men.

We recently partnered with Qualtrics to survey HR professionals on compensation, equity, and more. Click here to see what we learned.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

Far away from the world of cheery Zoom meetings and virtual workplace happy hours exists a movement, of sorts, intent on shattering the traditional dynamics of the employee-boss relationship. It isn’t a union or an angry mob wielding pitchforks outside Jeff Bezos’s rocket-ship factory. It’s the subreddit r/antiwork, a community of 1.7 million self-proclaimed “idlers” who post personal stories of quitting jobs, share memes that lampoon capitalism, and generally revel in sticking it to all manner of horrible bosses, from corporate plutocrats to overbearing middle managers.

Recently, the online community has been rocked by the fallout from then-moderator Doreen Ford’s appearance on Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime, and the subreddit was briefly made private on Thursday (Ford has since been removed). And despite the ideological quarrel currently spreading throughout the community—between founding moderators’ more militant anti-work stance and reformers who say they are more pro-union than anti-work—the rapid growth and popularity of the subreddit is worth noting.

Unfiltered venting. The subreddit is a wildly popular watercooler brimming with anti-boss invective, where the unemployed and underemployed gather to vent openly about the downsides of hustle culture and to question the very notion of working to meet the expectations of employers. Which is to say, it’s not sympathetic to Toby the HR rep, regardless of his winter blues.

According to Reddit spokesperson Jene Wheeless, the community grew “279% in subscribers and actually surpassed” 1 million members between 2020 and 2021. “It was one of the most popular communities of 2021,” she told HR Brew.

The subreddit advises its readers and subscribers to enact change beyond the confines of Reddit, providing links on how to organize a workplace in its FAQs. One frequenter of r/antiwork, Rachel Stephens, who reached out to HR Brew, offered this advice to any HR practitioner willing to listen: “HR should understand that people have lives outside of work and [that] rest makes employees more productive. People need paid time off to give birth to babies, to vote, and to go on vacation.”

HR can vent too! The fervor behind r/antiwork’s meteoric rise may be contributing to spin-off subreddits such as r/workreform and the nascent r/laborrevolution. Of course, HR professionals also struggle at work—the subreddit r/humanresources is something of a parallel universe for HR people lamenting their own problems. Now we just need an r/c-suite subreddit for this venting session to come full circle.—SB

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SammBlum on Twitter. For confidential conversations, ask Sam for his number on Signal.

As part of HR Brew’s interview series with HR chief executives, we recently sat down for a Zoom chat with Heather Dunn, the chief people officer at Gem, a modern recruiting platform. Dunn is young for a chief human resource officer (she’s 34); she began her HR career just shy of 10 years ago. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, centered around how to grow strategically and quickly as an HR professional, watch for burnout, and build trust with employees.

In your career you’ve made a lot of moves: You started out at Microsoft, went to Dropbox, an insurance firm, and then landed at Gem. How did you know it was time to leave a job? If I think back to themes, particularly during my time at Microsoft and Dropbox, it is that at these companies, I got incredible foundational knowledge. I learned from experts that had decades of career expertise. But I think with both of those roles, it got to a point where I felt like I wasn’t really growing or being able to innovate—especially at Microsoft. In the earlier stages of my career, the red tape and the bureaucracy to get anything done felt like a barrier to accelerating my own career. And so I ended up going smaller and smaller in that sense, to enable myself to be at the forefront of establishing those best in class practices that I learned from some of the larger companies. Also I wanted the ability to move fast, to pilot practice, and to make change more quickly.

Data indicates that HR leaders are burned out. Can you tell me about some of the unique factors of HR that lead to burnout? Not only is HR sort of the caretaker for the organization as a whole, but you’re also in one of the loneliest roles more generally at the company. That sounds very intense when I say it out loud, but when I think about what I get to work on, who I get to work with, what I hear day to day, and who I get to share that with, it’s a pretty limited group of people. And if I think about my own people team, they’re experiencing similar levels of loneliness. And so HR leaders that don’t have an outlet, whether that’s an HR community member or a deeply invested CEO, have really struggled, because they don’t have a support network around them.

How does Dunn get out of her “HR silo” and connect with employees? Read the rest of the interview here.—SV

Do you work in HR or have information about your HR department we should know? Email [email protected] or DM @SusannaVogel1 on Twitter. For confidential conversations, ask Susanna for her number on Signal.

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Adjusted for inflation, wages and salaries for private-sector employees declined 1.9% in the last 12 months ending December 2021. (Bureau of Labor Statistics, via SHRM)

Quote: “With Covid there was an interruption of work as we knew it. In moments like this, people have time to reflect. Working has been degraded for so many people. The authority structures that we’re in have gotten more draconian and more controlling than ever. People really felt that in a new way.”—Tom Juravich, a professor of labor studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, speaking to BBC Worklife about the anti-work movement

Read: Major pharmacy chains across the nation are struggling to staff their pharmacies due to Covid and a wave of resignations from an “exhausted” workforce. (Bloomberg)

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Catch up on the top HR Brew stories from the recent past:

• The growing gig economy has HR “walking a tightrope”
• Why more organizations are dropping college-degree requirements for job candidates
• UK companies will test out four-day work week