from Hacker News

There is no gender gap in tech salaries

by goronbjorn on 3/3/14, 4:34 PM with 124 comments

• by simonsarris on 3/3/14, 5:40 PM

  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

• by adamwong246 on 3/3/14, 5:40 PM

  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.

• by rayiner on 3/3/14, 5:38 PM

  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.

• by ameister14 on 3/3/14, 5:53 PM

  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)

• by abalone on 3/3/14, 6:06 PM

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

• by collyw on 3/3/14, 7:14 PM

  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.

• by velis_vel on 3/3/14, 5:39 PM

  > 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.

• by sonnyz on 3/3/14, 6:15 PM

  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.

• by Spooky23 on 3/3/14, 6:43 PM

  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.

• by NinjaEconomics on 3/9/14, 8:49 PM

  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

• by codr on 3/3/14, 7:10 PM

  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."

• by iamwithnail on 3/3/14, 8:02 PM

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

• by Carioca on 3/3/14, 6:13 PM

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

• by callesgg on 3/3/14, 9:28 PM

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

• by michaelochurch on 3/3/14, 6:47 PM

  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.

• by caiob on 3/3/14, 6:27 PM

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

• by undoware on 3/3/14, 6:17 PM

  Yes, just statistical gaps in who gets those salaries.

  Wake me when there's justice.

• by anovikov on 3/3/14, 6:06 PM

  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.