In tech, the gender pay gap increases with rank The tech industry’s lack of women is a well-worn issue, but a small consolation has been that in tech, the pay gap between men and women seems to be smaller than in other industries. In fact recently, several studies have trumpeted that in tech there is no gender pay gap at all. But new salary data from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies reported by Glassdoor shows that while that gap may start off either small or nonexistent at many companies, it increases as men and women rise through the ranks. At Google, for example, an entry-level female software engineer’s median salary is actually $4,192 more than her male counterpart. But by the time both genders have become senior software engineers, a female engineer makes more than $25,000 less. Similar trends turned up at Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft — all of the companies for which the report showed data for multiple levels of experience. The report was based on salary data reported by developers at 25 companies. Female computer scientists both in and out of Silicon Valley make about 89 percent what men in similar positions do, according to the work of Harvard labor economist Claudia Goldin. That differential is significantly better than in finance (66 percent), medicine (71 percent) and law (82 percent). But the Glassdoor report implies that in tech, women still do not receive raises at the same rate as men. Research suggests that women often hesitate to ask for raises. The tech industry, it seems, is not immune. Not that the tech industry has done much to encourage its female engineers — it was just in October that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested women should not ask for raises at all. Kristen V. Brown is a San Francisco Cronickle staff writer. E-mail: kbrown@sfchronicle Twitter: @kristenvbrown
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 03:06:03 +0000
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