🇧🇷 Brazil · 🇸🇪 Sweden
By Priya Mehta, The Global Office
In Sweden, salaries are, in significant respects, a collective matter. Trade unions negotiate sector-wide agreements, companies report gender pay data to regulators, and a new EU-aligned transparency directive is extending workers' legal right to know what their colleagues earn. In Brazil, salaries are a deeply private matter — discussed reluctantly, negotiated individually, and governed by a cultural norm in which asking what someone is paid is approximately as intrusive as asking what they weigh. Both countries have gender pay gaps. Both have workers who feel undercompensated. They are simply going about the discovery process very differently.
Brazil approaches salary with a reticence that reflects both cultural norms and economic volatility. Salaries are individually negotiated — between candidates and employers in smaller companies, or between unions and management for larger workforces — but the process is informal, relationship-dependent, and rarely benchmarked against transparent external data. Discussing pay with colleagues is taboo in most corporate environments; the assumption is that salary reflects individual worth, and comparing that worth to someone else's is uncomfortable for everyone involved.
Brazil scores 76 on Hofstede's Uncertainty Avoidance and 69 on Power Distance — a combination that produces workplaces where hierarchy shapes information flow and individual negotiation favors those with existing relationships or seniority. The jeitinho brasileiro — the characteristically Brazilian practice of finding creative workarounds — applies to salary negotiation as much as anywhere: indirect signals, relationship cultivation, and strategic timing of a request tend to matter more than a direct conversation about compensation.
The equity problem is significant. Brazil's 2023 Equal Pay Law (Lei 14.611/2023) began enforcement in 2024, requiring companies with more than 100 employees to report gender pay data and take corrective action if gaps exceed 5%. The national data is unflattering: Brazilian women earn approximately 78.8 cents for every real paid to men at equivalent positions, dropping to 73.4% among managers and 68.2% in roles requiring higher education. These figures have been known for years; the law represents a decision that they will no longer be tolerated as simply a feature of the market. Yet the cultural machinery for transparency is still underdeveloped — workers are frequently expected to propose a number without knowing what the employer is prepared to pay or what their future colleagues earn.
The Swedish labor market operates within a framework of collective agreements (kollektivavtal) negotiated between employers' organizations and trade unions across entire sectors. These agreements set minimum salary levels, annual pay increases, working hours, and conditions that apply, in principle, to the entire workforce in a given industry. About 90% of Swedish workers are covered by collective agreements. Salary negotiation in this context is not a zero-sum contest between a candidate and a hiring manager — it is a calibration exercise within a known range, conducted annually at the lönesamtal, with expected increases partially anchored by sectoral agreements.
Within this collective framework, individual negotiation does occur, but it operates in a cultural register that is distinctly Swedish. Modesty is expected; personal advocacy must be grounded in objective evidence rather than assertive self-promotion. The Swedish word lagom — approximately "just right," or "enough, not too much" — captures the cultural preference: a negotiation that produces a fair outcome, documented by facts, without theatrics. Arriving with a figure based on personal financial needs rather than market benchmarks is considered a category error.
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The transparency push has been accelerating. Sweden's draft legislation implementing the EU Pay Transparency Directive — published in May 2024 and now expected to take effect January 2027 — requires employers to disclose salary ranges to job applicants, prohibits inquiring into salary history, and grants workers the right to information about the pay levels of colleagues doing comparable work. The unadjusted gender pay gap in Sweden runs to 16%, a figure that the government regards as evidence that transparency reforms remain necessary despite the country's general reputation for gender equity. The adjusted gap is 3.4%, reflecting that much of the remaining gap is structural rather than discriminatory — but Sweden intends to close it with data and law.
Sweden's system is not without tension. The collective framework that provides security can feel constraining to high performers who believe their individual contribution exceeds the sectoral average; the transparency norms that protect workers can produce uncomfortable conversations when colleagues discover pay differentials that collective agreements were supposed to eliminate. Perhaps the deeper irony is that Sweden's culture of restraint can defeat its own transparency ambitions: workers who know they are underpaid still often leave the lönesamtal without asking for more, because asking feels culturally wrong.
Brazil's opacity problem runs the other direction. Workers who do not know what their colleagues earn cannot identify when they are being underpaid; the taboo against comparison is most useful to employers who benefit from the asymmetry. A thread on r/brazil about the new equal pay law generated comments ranging from cautious optimism to frank scepticism — enforcement is new, the cultural norm of privacy is old, and the two are not yet resolved. The honest version of both stories is that salary transparency is uncomfortable for everyone: for employers who preferred the opacity, for workers who are not sure they want to know, and for systems discovering that the distance between a legal right and a cultural norm is not easily closed by legislation alone.
Quora — On Swedish salary transparency: "In Sweden, tax returns are public record — you can go to the Tax Office and look up what anyone earns. But in practice, people rarely do this, and actually asking a colleague directly what they make is still considered quite awkward. The transparency exists in the infrastructure, not necessarily in the conversation."
The Local Sweden — From a reader survey on working as an international in Sweden: "I perceive a lack of ambition — the so-called Jantelagen, no salary increases, everybody is equal, something that discourages ambitious people. You hear about it, but to experience it really shows you the difference in values."
r/sweden — On the annual lönesamtal: "The process felt procedurally safe — structured, calm, no drama. But the cultural norm against self-advocacy meant that I left without asking for what I actually deserved. I knew it. My manager probably knew it. Neither of us said anything."
r/brazil — On the new equal pay law: "The law exists. Enforcement is another matter. Salaries are still deeply private here, and nobody wants to be the one who breaks that norm — not employees, not HR, and certainly not the employers who benefit from it."
Swedifier.com — On salary mobility in Sweden: "Many international professionals start with a low salary believing they will earn better chances to negotiate once they prove their worth. After years, that raise never comes. The only real leverage in the Swedish system is leaving."
Sweden has decided that salary is too important to leave to individual information asymmetry and is building the institutional infrastructure to eliminate it. Brazil has enacted laws pointing in the same direction while working against a culture that still finds the subject too personal for comfort. Both countries have workers who feel they are not being paid what they are worth, and both have systems that — through very different mechanisms — make it structurally difficult to do much about it.
Neither has finished the conversation. Sweden's head start is significant. Brazil's scale is formidable. And in both cases, the most practical piece of advice remains the same: know your number before you walk into the room, because the person across from you almost certainly already knows theirs.
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Priya Mehta
Staff writer covering financial markets and corporate strategy. Has strong opinions about spreadsheets.