There is no gender gap in tech salaries

http://qz.com/182977/there-is-no-gender-gap-in-tech-salaries/

by goronbjorn • 12 years ago

162 124 12 years ago

rayiner4• 12 years ago

I agree with the decision to leave "makes the same career choices" out of the equation, but I think people have to admit a lot of those "choices" aren't free from gender based social pressure. My wife's attitude going into parenthood was that she was going to "parent like a father." This was a necessary consequence of us both maintaining busy careers, but I have to say that I make out a lot better in peoples' eyes for doing the same level of parenting. I take the night feedings? I'm some sort of wizard dad. She prepares the lunch for daycare? Why doesn't she make this or that toddler puree? When a stranger glares for our daughter not wearing socks in the cold (I swear she had them on when we left the house!), its never at me, always her. As a result, she's racking up a non-trivial amount of working mom guilt. She doesn't want to mommy track her career, but it irritates her that if she did people would support her decision in a way they wouldn't if I did the same.

fibbery• 12 years ago

As someone who will be in the same position as your wife not too far from now, this is both good to know and frustrating. Have you ever had people refer to your taking care of the kids as "baby sitting"? I've heard that one is common.

rayiner4• 12 years ago

That sort of comment just sets the bar low for what's expected of me. Meanwhile, my wife wants to be perceived as a good parent too, but she can't get too invested in that because she can't reconcile her career with all the baby wearing/toddler puree/breastfeeding until two stuff that's the benchmark in her circle of mommy friends.

velis_vel• 12 years ago

Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation, economic sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as opposed to one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade point average, undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age, geographical region, and marital status.

The problem with controlling for all those things is that you leave out other factors; for example, if men were preferentially hired over women, that wouldn't show up in this data.

ameister145• 12 years ago

That's true, but we're talking about equal pay for equal work.

Such a case would definitely be discrimination, it just wouldn't be germane.

adamwong246• 12 years ago

It's nice to see woman writing on this subject. As a man, you'd be a fool to say such things in public. The social fallout from uttering these unpopular ideas will earn you only contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a twitter witch hunt.

bdg2• 12 years ago

The social fallout from uttering these unpopular ideas will earn you only contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a twitter witch hunt.

I agree. The fact I have a penis attached to me means that I don't get to participate equally with all conversation partners. So while I'm all for equality, I keep quiet about things I both disagree and agree with, because my opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit a priori.

rayiner4• 12 years ago

I gotta say I don't buy this. I was the token conservative on a lot of issues in grad school and I never got flack for saying my opinion on gender or race or economic issues as an Asian male from a privileged background. Not being an asshole about it works wonders.

dovel• 12 years ago

You seem to have a bad attitude going into it. If you have thoughts and feeling and you can explain your position when 'under attack' then you need not be worried about such things. If you think people discredit your opinions because of your penis then you are wrong. I am not saying that discrediting your opinions is a good thing or valid way of discussing things but the reason for it is not your genitalia, it is because male, female, trans etc all have very different experiences of how society reacts/treats their gender or sexuality. Some people may get agitated when they hear someone who is not in their situation, talking about their situation. But that is because of their past experiences and if you provide a comprehensive explanation of your beliefs, then there is no reason for you to worry about how people react to you, because you will know you have been understood. Some people are quick to throw opinions around without reason and it means people like you become afraid to voice yours. If you focus on what you are trying to say then it will contribute to a discussion and if it descends into something you did not expect (a twitter witch hunt?) then you know that you have articulated yourself in such a precise and intricate manner and you know your remarks cannot be taken incorrectly.

GFK_of_xmaspast2• 12 years ago

It's pretty bullshit a posteriori as well.

gcb0• 12 years ago

It's not really. Dishing out the previous trend on hn about women needing handicap still removed merit from all the serious, hard working women. So speaking up is in the best interest of the ones not willing to compromise the achieved equality for a little easier ride in the short term.

simonsarris• 12 years ago

I'm a little surprised that there is a serious concern that this article doesn't address with gender-gapped salaries, though, and it's been touched upon several times on HN. Women tend to negotiate starting salaries and raises much less than men do, to the point where it can skew wage statistics by a nontrivial amount.

There was someone on HN a while ago who hired several engineers, and said that his company pays women less than men because he makes the same starting offer to several people, and almost all the men asked for more money, yet none of the women did. So the offers the company made were "fair", but the end results were very skewed wages.

There are entire books about this subject, such as "Women Don't Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation"[1]

Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation (Didn't Fog Creek do this?), or making all employees salaries transparent (countries like Norway do this, and we do this for C-levels often in the US, just not plain old employees).

I suspect nothing institutional will change though because it would ultimately cost companies money. They benefit too much from workers who negotiate poorly.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553383876

gonehome• 12 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking (I remember that previous HN comment too).

I'd also suspect younger people negotiate less and people who are newer in the cycle of generational wealth (don't have someone helping them understand the process). Maybe since there are fewer women in engineering and friendships tend to generally be segregated by sex they don't have people to talk to about this kind of negotiation which further compounds the issue.

faet2• 12 years ago

"Women are penalized more than men for negotiating," Babcock tells Alex Cohen. "People are less likely to like them; if they negotiate in a job interview, they are less likely to hire them. There are real social sanctions that occur when women initiate negotiations."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1252923...

Nursie9• 12 years ago

You know that study is based on role-play, not reality, right?

ManFromUranus• 12 years ago

Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation

Fix what? What are they "fixing"? They seem to be fixing the problem of people being able to do better than default. Exiting times we live in...

_delirium2• 12 years ago

Well, if a company both: 1) didn't negotiate wage offers; but 2) offered wages lower than people were willing to accept... they would end up with not enough employees. So it's not like they could just offer whatever they wanted.

I'm not sure it will work, but it seems to be the wage-side proposal of what e.g. Saturn is trying to do with cars: just say, look, this is our price, take it or leave it. Rather than the traditional car (and salary) pricing model where the real price you're willing to agree to is hidden, and arrived at via a negotiation process. That often results in whoever's better at negotiating getting the better deal. Now if it's a negotiating job that might even be a good thing, because the better negotiators are more valuable to you. Or if it's a job where the skill you're looking for correlates highly with being good at negotiating. But if that's not the case, just making the final offer of what you're willing to pay up front, rather than starting lower and negotiating upwards, could be better idea. Then rather than negotiating per-candidate, you just adjust your offer policy until it's high enough to get the kind of candidates you want.

Crito8• 12 years ago

It's the Harrison Bergeron method of pursuing equality. Instead of pulling up the disadvantaged, the advantaged are artificially limited. Prejudices and handicaps limiting the disadvantaged (in this case, prejudices against women who negotiate) are considered to be unchangeable facts of life; correcting those prejudices is not even considered.

I think that instead of disallowing negotiation at all, we could look to university job courses (the ones that currently teach resume and interviewing skills) to teach negotiation skills and techniques. It would be something that any student could find valuable. Not only would it make young people entering the job market more comfortable with the idea of negotiation, but it would make people on the company side of things more familiar and comfortable with the notion of women negotiating (correcting that prejudice, instead of accepting/ignoring it as the Bergeron-solution does).

If that proves unsuccessful, then less "personal" negotiation processes could be explored before the idea of negotiation was written off entirely. Perhaps sending a form letter with every offer letter saying something along the lines of "I'm sorry but I have to decline [position] because I've received a better offer of [$] from [company]" could work. Some sort of more forumalic approach to negotiation that reduces the human element (and therefore hopefully, the opportunity for human prejudices to manifest. I think that it is best to combat the prejudices however, not work around them).

Nursie9• 12 years ago

And if I get a better offer from another workplace, but you think the extra 10k I'm asking for will be more than offset by the productivity gains I'm bringing to the table? You'll happily turn me down and get a worse team?

Not really a world I want to live in.

_delirium2• 12 years ago

It's a complex problem because there are feedback effects, but I think often that is a better decision for companies. Otherwise you end up with the situation where the people who are constantly threatening to leave get paid more, and the people who are spending their time doing actual work, rather than polishing their resumes and interviewing around, get paid less. This then incentivizes people who actually don't want to leave to go out and start collecting offers so they can argue better for a raise, which is a huge waste of their time and effort.

Taking one decision in isolation, it might be better to pay someone $10k more to keep them from leaving. But it might be better structurally to come up with a different policy for allocating raises than "allocate them to the people who negotiate most hardball". Unless, maybe, it's a sales job, where being good at negotiating is precisely the skill you want to reward.

thedufer4• 12 years ago

you think the extra 10k I'm asking for will be more than offset by the productivity gains I'm bringing to the table

Then your initial offer wasn't made in good faith. No-negotiation forces the person making the offer to actually consider what that hire would be worth, and offer accordingly.

rch• 12 years ago

Some women might not press for raises (in some industries), but I have learned a ton about negotiation from female friends of mine. Like the director-level person at the last place I worked who started with literally twice the vacation days I had, just for example. And the family member who is simply always evaluating opportunities; she might take a first offer, but that is just a piece of data to her (i.e. if you're making it her problem to ask for more, then you're already at a disadvantage).

And don't underestimate the effect of networking among talented professional women either. Another friend of mine casually mentioned she was uncertain about a new boss during a ski trip and she immediately had solid options in better environments, one of which she took.

Other industries may lag, but it's fairly well established here that employers in technical and engineering fields are stuck with an increasingly difficult challenge of attracting and retaining talent. If you're not doing this proactively across the board already, then I'd love to know why.

breischl• 12 years ago

I suspect it will not change because stopping negotiation is not actually achievable. Certainly you could disallow negotiation for direct, monetary compensation, but that would just push the negotiation into other areas. People would start negotiating for more vacation, more holidays, better benefits, a bigger office, a company car, an assistant, a private "education budget" (ie, pay me to take a vacation) or whatever else they can. The number of ways to compensate someone are limited only by imagination and can move much more quickly than regulation can catch up.

A small example of this is when the US froze wages during World War 2, thus employers started offering perks like company-paid health insurance. That has since evolved into the mess we have now - that sure worked out great for everyone, didn't it?

phillmv• 12 years ago

Intra (small) company you could achieve this - "sorry, everyone gets the same deal: $x0k/year and y weeks of vacay and we only have one company benefits plan".

Gets trickier once if you're immense and have very specific skillset requirements.

tomsaffell• 12 years ago

When I started dating my (now) wife, she didn't negotiate her salary, and was at a company where other people did. I helped her figure out what to ask for, how to negotiate, and how to feel good about it. We built a spreadsheet to arm her with some data (e.g. salary compared to inflation). It worked.

I hope by mentioning it that other people might do similarly.

ed209• 12 years ago

sounds great. Any chance of a quick how-to? I'm a male and I've never negotiated a salary either.

ry0ohki• 12 years ago

What I've found anecdotally from my wife and other girls I talk to about negotiating salary is they usually downplay it's importance because they get too attached to the position/company "Oh well I really like this place and what they offered was decent even though it's less than I'm making now, plus they give two weeks of vacation!", so usually they'll go back and get a miserable little 1k to 2k bump from original offer then gladly accept it.

Mz2• 12 years ago

Thank you for sharing this. It's practical. And not pitying, condescending, etc. Just helping her with a weak point, something we all have, no matter who we are.

-- signed, underpaid female. :-)

ap22213• 12 years ago

Openness in wages (and benefits) would be a good move. It would encourage salaries to go up faster, when there are market inefficiencies.

collyw2• 12 years ago

I agree. Hiding salaries can only benefit the company, not the individual.

draugadrotten• 12 years ago

Openness is wages (and benefits) would be a good move. It would encourage salaries to go up faster, when there are market inefficiencies.

Wages are public in Sweden (e.g. http://ratsit.se) and that doesn't make wages in Sweden high or raise faster. Salaries are, on average, much higher in neighbour Norway than in Sweden.

So there are other - more important - factors at play than knowing the competitions salaries.

steffan• 12 years ago

I think disallowing negotiation is ill-advised for several reasons.

If an explicit salary negotiation is banned, people will find other things to negotiate instead.

You will likely lose potential hires because you refuse to budge on salary. It is an inadvertent [negative] signal if, for example, the company is not even willing to add $5 to a salary. That would definitely be a deterrent to me.

Finally, this potentially penalizes all of those who do negotiate salary to attempt to appease those who won't. It sends a message that (in this context) women are weaker and cannot possibly learn to negotiate. A far better solution is to change the culture to help all, men and women both, feel comfortable and informed when negotiating terms of a new position.

Also worth stating: negotiation is a skill that helps throughout life, and rather then attempt to bury it in a specific context, it is far better to raise everyone up so that they can reap its rewards elsewhere.

joelrunyon• 12 years ago

I'd be interested in seeing if you stripped the gender data off this & gave everyone a negotiation-skill score & saw how salary discrepancies followed that distribution.

encoderer• 12 years ago

I suspect nothing institutional will change though because it would ultimately cost companies money. They benefit too much from workers who negotiate poorly.

Don't know if I agree with this. Maybe I can hire a somewhat experienced female engineer for $110k, but I know that sooner or later a recruiter or friend or GlassDoor query will tip her off that her peers are making 20% more. When that happens her morale will suffer, or she'll quit, or both.

When I've hired candidates who truly did not know their own worth, I made them offers above their asking to be inline with market rates.

Mz2• 12 years ago

Keep saying this and things like it. I read somewhere about a company that paid top dollar for its field. They had lower employee turnover than any other company in their industry. This saved the company scads of money in terms of hiring costs and had other benefits that are hard to readily quantify in terms of money but which do impact the bottom line (such as employees who had been there for years and years and had deep niche knowledge).

The thing we need to do is inform folks that screwing women (or anyone) over comes back to bite you. It isn't advantage to "take advantage" of anyone. The real costs are non-obvious and may be somewhere down the line but they do exist.

Have an(other) upvote. :-)

lugg• 12 years ago

I remember hearing similar stories around recruitment. Women, on average would apply for job adverts only if they met around 90% of the job description requirements. Where men would generally just take the shotgun approach and apply with around 50% of the requirements.

Never really understood this "statistic" still dont. I do wonder if things have changed? I have a couple of girl friends in tech and have to do a fair bit of ego and confidence building before they work up enough balls to tell their bosses they are bored and need new responsibility and a raise to boot. Most guys I know just ask for more money in passing til it happens or they leave.

Disclaimer, I dont know shit about the inner workings of the female mind all I have is anecdote and the up most respect for girls/women in tech or otherwise.

NextUserName• 12 years ago

I agree that his may be part of the difference, but here is my experience.

There IS a gender gap, but with it a matching skills/abilities gap.

I have experienced this first hand with dozens of women. A rare couple of them were top notch developers. They were ambitions and had a real passion for development and technology. So did about 20-25% of the men I worked with (vs less than 10% of the women). The other woman and men had base skills, but rarely showed ambition or passion to learn new thing and improve their skills, habits, tools, ETC. They were kind of just grinders. They never excelled or impressed. They weren't the kind who would tinker on the weekends with OSS or read development or tech blogs or books when they had free time.

The top notch women were promoted and made similar salaries as the top notch men. Overall though, the women lagged behind the men percentage wise because of the reasons mentioned.

I would be curious to know if others have seen this pattern. This is based on my 15 years in the software industry.

cameldrv• 12 years ago

The study is about salaries that are actually received though, not offers. The article says that there is a 6.6% gap over all occupations, which could definitely be due to women negotiating less. In Computer Science though, there is no gap. This might be due to women negotiating more than in other occupations or men negotiating less.

ameister145• 12 years ago

I posted this in another thread, but it's valid here as well: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09279.pdf

Basically, in a study of federal workers, a 7% unexplained gap exists between male and female worker's wages when controlling for occupational, experiential and educational differences, among other things.

Especially relevant data is on pages 84-86.

(edited for clarity)

twistedpair• 12 years ago

At least it's no longer an integer multiple difference between male and female wages.

But why would we ever expect them to be 0% different? Recall that natural unemployment is ~3%. The market and real world are not perfectly efficient and making them perfectly efficient would make them less efficient in the process.

ameister145• 12 years ago

Yeah, sorry I wasn't more clear; specifically the difference is one of wages, not overall employment level.

I wouldn't expect uncontrolled wages to be entirely equal. I would expect that eventually controlling for employment history, experience, education etc. would make the difference approach zero, though. I think that'd be good.

rmc4• 12 years ago

So what if there was sexist reasons why women weren't going into certain professions? That's consistant with your claim.

ameister145• 12 years ago

That's entirely possible, but it's not really what we're talking about. The women that don't get the job because of discrimination don't play into the wage gap because position is controlled for.

Discrimination is an important discussion in general, but most of the time it's extremely hard to prove that someone didn't get a job because the hiring officer was prejudiced. This wage gap stuff is easier to quantify and is a visible problem to solve.

abalone2• 12 years ago

Very poor methodology. The study only looked at first year salaries and the author extrapolated from there. Totally invalid.

TheCowboy• 12 years ago

It's not a poor methodology if you are simply measuring starting salaries only, or if salaries never increase. But it is reckless to make a bold declaration that "there is no gender gap in tech salaries" based on this data.

I don't think it's hard for people to imagine that there is less variance in starting salaries. Reading into this data and thinking it applies to anything beyond that is a guess and should be treated as such with that guess being tested in future studies.

Even if you demonstrate there is no wage discrimination over the course of people's careers, it doesn't account for the huge gender gap in the industry.

abalone2• 12 years ago

Right, it was the blogger who made the error. Very poor reporting, I should say.

"7% gender gap in starting tech salaries" would have been a fairer headline.

anovikov• 12 years ago

In the coder freelancing world, women easily command higher wages than men do (and with reason). Easy proof is that there seem to be a lot of female freelancer profiles on sites like odesk.com, but most of them hide a man behind them (just try to make them do a voice call). Because guys know women are better paid. I have never heard of reverse.

Carioca• 12 years ago

Here's an interesting analysis: http://www.metafilter.com/126704/with-numbers-like-these-why...

sonnyz• 12 years ago

I think it's wonderful that it's uncommon for there to be a gap in salaries based on gender. This is something I've paid close attention to over the past 8 years. My wife and I are both software developers with roughly the same level of experience and expertise. So far it seems like the person with the highest salary is usually the one that most recently changed jobs, since negotiating a new salary is much easier then negotiating a large raise.

undoware• 12 years ago

Yes, just statistical gaps in who gets those salaries.

Wake me when there's justice.

caiob• 12 years ago

Are we still discussing the whole women vs men in tech thingy? I miss when HN used to discuss real issues.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

IMO, this is all about the tech market being more about skills than seniority.

My wife was out on unpaid leave for nearly two years when we had our first child. That meant that she missed two salary scale steps, which are earned based on satisfactory performance over a period of at least 1,500 paid hours/year. In her case, that means that a male who started the same day as her makes approximately $2,500 more than her, assuming the same career path. (She started at level-x and is at level-x+y.)

For a nurse, or techie, salary is driven by the market in most cases.

PeterisP• 12 years ago

If you're doing such a comparison, then it points towards a salary system that's working as it should, but a disbalance in gender roles in childcare - which can be fixed not by changes to salaries, but by changes in childcare policies such as those successfully implemented by Sweden and others, where male nurses in similar situation as your wife would take time off comparable to female nurses. They'd still be behind childless workers, though.

That's how it works, if your family is more valuable to you than your career, then you'd be happy with getting more family at the tradeoff of less career - and that explains why the positions at the very top get a disproportionally large number of divorces/etc - if someone is consistently neglecting family because of their career, then they do get to the top easier than someone who'd sometimes actually prefer going home to their kids.

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

I think there is, but I can't prove it. I have anecdotes about specific companies, and some companies are viciously sexist while others aren't. Most of the sexism comes from the mainstream business culture (what I sometimes call "MBA culture" but that's not entirely fair because some MBAs are fine) and not from tech itself. (Brogrammers are trying to be ballers, not hackers.) The more "corporate" a tech company is, the more it will be sexist. Often this isn't overt, so much as an artifact; women get the shaft not because of explicit sexism but because they don't negotiate for themselves or elbow their way on to the best projects.

Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation, economic sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as opposed to one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade point average, undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age, geographical region, and marital status.

That's really misleading. Some of those variables at least might have gender baked into them. For one example, let's say that women are more likely to have longer unemployment spells after college. (I don't know if this is true.) Then there could be zero gender correlation in the model not because there is none, but because that input factors it out.

With 11 variables, some of those being categories, you're going to almost certainly have "small data" issues on real world datasets, where the inputs (empirical "design matrix") are not even remotely orthogonal. So pardon me if I don't buy it.

The issue isn't that companies explicitly choose to pay women poorly. It's that many tech companies end up with shitty cultures that exclude women, which leaves them out of the loop and causes them to end up on shitty projects. It doesn't happen by intention. The leadership of most tech companies is criminally negligent on a lot of cultural issues, but not explicitly sexist.

ETA: it's also worth pointing out the "women don't negotiate" argument. I think this is because they get worse results. My wife is a better negotiator than I am, in terms of skill level, but whenever we have to haggle on the price of something, I go out... and I often get more, not because I am better, but because a 6' male is more intimidating.

codr• 12 years ago

Looks like there's a 6.6% salary gap?

"When controlled for all factors other than gender, the earnings difference between men and women is about 6.6%, something most people don’t know."

jldugger• 12 years ago

That's across all occupations.

collyw2• 12 years ago

One thing that is interesting is that "their sample was restricted to those under 35 years old receiving a first bachelor’s degree".

I wonder how how it would look after that age range.

I am guessing from my anecdotal experience that most professional women usually wait until around that sort of age to have children, and how much having children is a factor in gaining higher salaries.

In addition to that, I am guessing that people early in their careers are less likely to negotiate salary. I certainly was. Now I have a fair bit of experience, I can see that I am more knowledgeable and valuable than some of my colleagues, and so I am in a position to negotiate, with good reasons to back it up. Graduating in the dot-com bust, I was happy just to get a job after nearly a year and a half of searching. I didn't feel I was in any position to negotiate then.

iamwithnail2• 12 years ago

Mildly ridiculous to draw the line at35 though, which will be around the time a lot of high performing women will have kids.

gaius2• 12 years ago

If a person, male or female, takes some significant amount of time off work, for any reason, should that person continue to accrue seniority, be considered for raises and promotion, equally to colleagues who didn't take the time off, who were working and contributing?

Strip the gender politics out of it and the answer is very obviously no.

iamwithnail2• 12 years ago

That's my point really; women are still expected to bear the brunt of child rearing, so pay the financial penalty. Cf Norwegian policies and smaller gender pay gap.

callesgg• 12 years ago

But three is a gender distribution that is of the charts.

NinjaEconomics• 12 years ago

My article in Quartz didn't address all of the reasons women earn less than men do because of space constraints. Also, the article was discussing new research on pay equality in STEM fields, with a summary on gender wage gap as background.

It is interesting to discuss whether there is more pay equality in STEM fields, specifically engineering, because females in these fields are also more comfortable with (and better at) negotiating higher salaries for themselves. At the moment there isn't research to suggest this but it could be a contributing factor.

- @NinjaEconomics

There is no gender gap in tech salaries

Related Stories