In Turkey, Everyone Negotiates. In Ireland, No One Is Allowed to Say What They're Paid.

🇹🇷 Turkey · 🇮🇪 Ireland

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

According to OECD Taxing Wages data, the average worker in Ireland earns roughly three times what the average worker in Turkey does — €60,258 a year against €18,590. That is a genuinely enormous gap, the kind that should make for two very different conversations about money. And yet ask a Turkish office worker what they earn and there is a decent chance you get a straight answer, possibly with a counter-offer attached. Ask an Irish one and, per an Indeed-commissioned survey covered in the Irish Times, you have roughly an 84 percent chance of being told, politely, that it's nobody's business — a discretion some 20 percent of respondents reportedly extend even to their own live-in partner. Salary transparency, it turns out, has very little to do with how much anyone actually has to hide.

Do's & Don'ts

🇹🇷 Turkey

🇮🇪 Ireland

Turkey

Turkish workers are, by the numbers, unusually willing to ask for more. A survey cited by recruiter Michael Page found that 57 percent of respondents had attempted to renegotiate their salary in the past year, and 84 percent said they felt confident doing so — figures that would make an Irish HR department reach for the smelling salts. That confidence isn't evenly distributed: 90 percent of men said they'd be comfortable asking for a raise, against 74 percent of women, a gap that tracks the country's broader labor-market pattern of lower female workforce participation and confidence in pay conversations.

The macroeconomic backdrop makes negotiation less a personality trait than a survival skill. According to TUIK, Turkey's Structure of Earnings Survey put the average gross monthly wage at roughly TRY 25,482 in its last full release, with the 2026 minimum wage revised sharply upward — a familiar ritual in an economy where persistent inflation means last year's salary conversation is already stale. Every payslip, by law, must itemize gross pay, social security contributions, and tax deductions in full, which gives Turkish employees more line-item visibility into their own compensation than many of their European counterparts enjoy — even as peer-to-peer comparison remains informal and relationship-dependent rather than data-driven.

That informality has a cultural logic. Hofstede Insights scores Turkey at 66 on power distance and just 37 on individualism, describing a society that is comparatively hierarchical and collectivist. Negotiating pay is less a spreadsheet exercise than a personal one, conducted through rapport with a superior rather than an appeal to published bands — an extension, several Quora contributors note, of a broader national comfort with haggling that Turks apply to market stalls, rents, and, it turns out, job offers with equal ease.

Ireland

Ireland's numbers tell an almost opposite story. The CSO's most recent Gender Pay Gap Report put the national gap at 9.6 percent in 2022, below the EU average of 12.7 percent recorded by Eurostat — respectable, on paper. Dig into sectors, though, and the picture turns lopsided: a 35.1 percent gap in the legal profession and 33.5 percent in aviation, according to CSO figures, gaps too large to be explained by anything except who gets hired, promoted, and quietly paid more for the same chair.

What makes Ireland distinctive isn't the gap itself but the silence around it. The Irish Times reported that just 16 percent of Irish workers would tell a colleague their salary if asked, and more than four in ten said they had, at some point, discovered a colleague in the same role earning more than they were — a discovery made despite, not because of, any system designed to reveal it. Solicitors quoted in that same piece note that the incoming EU Pay Transparency Directive, which Ireland has already missed the deadline to transpose, will require job ads to state a salary or range and will bar employers from asking candidates their previous pay — closing off, as one put it, the practice of rewarding people "for what he or she was lucky or unlucky enough to negotiate with a past employer." Separately, IrishJobs-StepStone data drawn from 1.3 million job ads found men expect a median salary of €64,000 against €53,000 for women of comparable skill — a 17 percent gap in expectation alone, before any negotiation even starts.

The paradox is that Ireland scores low on power distance (28) and high on individualism (70) in Hofstede's framework — a profile that, in theory, should produce a workplace culture of flat hierarchies and forthright self-advocacy. Instead, individualism here seems to have curdled into privacy: everyone is on their own, and no one is telling anyone else the number.

The Reckoning

Line the two countries up and the intuitive story breaks. Turkey, more hierarchical and more collectivist by Hofstede's measure, produces workers who negotiate loudly, often, and without much embarrassment. Ireland, flatter and more individualist on paper, produces workers who would rather discuss almost anything — the weather, the traffic, a difficult in-law — than their own payslip. If national culture theory predicted pay openness, it has the sign backwards here.

The deeper irony is about where transparency actually comes from. In Turkey, transparency is a matter of legal plumbing: every payslip is itemized down to the last deduction, whether or not colleagues ever compare notes. In Ireland, transparency is a matter of legislative import — a directive drafted in Brussels, arriving late, aimed squarely at a culture that would frankly prefer not to know. Turkey's workers negotiate because inflation forces them to; Ireland's workers stay quiet because propriety tells them to, right up until the EU tells them to stop.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Blind — a worker in Turkey weighing a roughly €70,000 gross offer from a Dublin employer said the country's worsening economic conditions made the decision easy regardless of the exact figure, describing simply getting out of Turkey as reward enough.

Blind — commenters evaluating a €110,000 Dublin senior engineering offer spent less time debating the base salary than the discovery that income above roughly €70,000 is taxed near 52 percent, with one asking whether Irish law actually entitles a candidate to request the pay band before negotiating.

Blind — a thread sharing a viral LinkedIn salary-negotiation script drew mostly skeptical replies, with one commenter redirecting others to a well-known engineer's own published negotiation rules instead of trusting the tactic at face value.

Quora — a respondent explaining Turkey's bargaining culture noted that nearly every transaction carries an assumed "bargaining margin," extending the market-haggling reflex from carpets and rent straight into salary discussions.

Conclusion

The practical advice is almost too simple: in Turkey, negotiate early, negotiate often, and expect the number to move; in Ireland, do your homework quietly because no one else will confirm it for you, and wait for Brussels to do the part your own workplace culture won't. Both systems produce a gender pay gap in the end — Turkey's driven by unequal confidence, Ireland's by unequal information — which suggests the tools change but the outcome, stubbornly, does not. Ireland is about to get a law that makes salaries visible; Turkey has salaries that are legally itemized to the cent and culturally negotiated over coffee. Neither country has actually solved the problem — they've just filed it under different departments.