Women in tech face a smaller wage gap than many other industries. However, their chances of getting hired for those jobs are still low, a new study suggests.
The pay gap between women and men in tech has decreased, but companies interview only male candidates for these jobs 41 percent of the time, according to new data from job website Hired.com, which places people in positions like software engineering, data scientist or product manager.
Women made 97 cents on the dollar compared to men for the same STEM jobs at the same company this year, a slight improvement from 96 cents on the dollar for the two previous years. (STEM refers to jobs in science, technology, engineering and math.)
Across all industries, women made about 77 cents for every dollar men made in 2018, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Like other sectors, the pay disparity in tech is worse for women of color: Latino and black women in STEM were paid 91 cents and 89 cents, respectively, for every dollar their white male colleagues in the same position at the same company made.
Tech jobs pay relatively well. The average salary was $87,570 in 2017, nearly double the national average wage for non-STEM occupations ($45,700), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
More than half of women (61 percent) said they found out after they were hired they were being paid less than men and 16 percent of them said the difference was at least $20,000, according to the Hired report. Part of the reason for the pay gap, the survey suggests, is because women and people of color ask for less money upfront.
“The data points toward a bigger culprit: Expectations,” Nina Roussille, a PhD candidate in economics at the University of California, Berkeley who did research for Hired.com said.
“Women are being offered less because they are asking for less. Once we account for a candidates’ asking salary, the wage gap essentially disappears.”
The Hired data shows that women in tech are slowly starting to push for more money. This year, they asked for four percent less than men, a two percent improvement from 2018. In the past two years, men were offered higher salaries 63 percent of the time, but that dropped to 60 percent this year, according to the survey.
Raises, however, are still harder to come by for females in STEM: seven percent more men than women reported successfully negotiating a higher salary.
One possible reason for the disparity in who gets interviewed for tech jobs: There are fewer women choosing careers in STEM fields, according to the Pew Research Center. There are a variety of reasons, but some experts say the trend is partly related to discrimination and outright harassment of women in the tech sector, as well as girls’ lack of exposure to tech concepts in school.
The $1.8 trillion tech industry is the largest growing sector of the US economy and is expected to increase by 13 percent from 2016 to 2026, according to an analysis by Cyberstates, a tech industry market research firm.
Companies in San Francisco tend to have the smallest wage gaps in tech, offering women on average six percent less than men in similar jobs. In other cities including Seattle, Los Angeles and New York, the gender wage gaps for tech jobs is eight percent.
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