It’s no secret that the technology field can be brutal to anyone who isn’t a white male. New data shows just how those inequalities play out in today’s tech workers’ paychecks.
A black woman in tech makes $79,000 for every $100,000 a white man makes
Women altogether make less than men.
20th Century Fox
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
Nearly two in three women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company, according to Hired, a job website that focuses on placing people in tech jobs such as software engineer, product manager or data scientist. That’s slightly better than last year, when 69 percent of women received lower offers.
Women, on average, were paid 4 percent less than men for the same kind of job, the study found.
For the study, Hired mined data from 120,000 salary offers to 27,000 candidates at 4,000 companies. In general, applicants to these tech fields skew male (75 percent), but that doesn’t account for the disparity in who gets interviewed.
Companies interviewed only men for a position 53 percent of the time; 6 percent of the time, they interviewed only women.
“Not only are women getting lower offers when they actually get offers, but a large amount of time, companies have openings and they’re not interviewing women at all,” said Jessica Kirkpatrick, Hired’s data scientist.
Hired’s data also breaks down offer salaries by race, compared with a white man in the same job. The effects of race are even more dramatic:
- Black women are offered 79 cents to every dollar offered to a white man.
- Black men make 88 cents.
- Latina women make 83 cents.
- White women make 90 cents.
Additionally, LGBTQ women and men are offered less money than their non-LGBTQ counterparts.
There are numerous reasons for this pay inequity. Part of the problem is that women, minorities and LGBTQ people ask for less than white males for the same position.
According to Kirkpatrick, these groups ask for less because people base their salary expectations on what they’re already making. For these groups, their lower pay often reflects a lot of historical inequities accrued over their careers, like being denied raises or promotions.
By not offering people comparable wages, Kirkpatrick said that companies are jeopardizing their job retention. “When people figure out what their teammates are making, it’s ultimately not good for maintaining talent and creating a collegial environment,” she said.
It also makes Silicon Valley’s already tight talent pool even smaller.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
See More:
