Why Are Female Developers Offered Such Low Salaries? Developer Auction lets employers bid on top tech talent in competitive two-week auctions. For each auction, the company filters thousands of developers down to a few hundred of the best profiles. Employers can make these candidates job offers which include salary, equity, and signing bonus details. Founder Matt Mickiewicz has noticed a curious phenomenon on the site. Women represent just 7% of the candidates in our marketplace but 12% of our Top 100 most all-time popular developers, says Mickiewicz. Our top ever engineer in our marketplace was a woman who got 24 offers and had a Computer Science degree from Stanford. According to the site, most developers receive between 5 and 15 offers. Here’s where things get strange. The median offer to a female engineer on Developer Auction is $100,000 versus $120,000 for her male counterpart. The average offer is $103,500 for women as opposed to $118,400 for men. The highest ever offer to a female engineer, the aforementioned all-time most popular coder on Developer Auction, was $160,000 while the top salary offer to a man was $240,000. To put this in context, developers with H1B visas also get lower salary offers and 32% fewer job offers than average on Developer Auction. But they still get higher offers than women. H1B holders receive a median offer of $117.5,000 and $114,500 average offer. I asked Mickiewicz why he thought female developers get more job offers but at lower salaries and whether there are significant differences between the years of experience or in-demand skills in the profiles of Developer Auction’s female versus male candidates. I think its just the gender-wage gap thats seen in other industries, he said. Since employers don’t see the minimum salary requirements of developers on the site, the salary gap can’t be down to female engineers setting lower minimum salaries. There’s also no salary negotiation at the auction stage (offers are non-binding and may be renegotiated at the interview stage), so the difference cannot be accounted for by the much-cited theory that women need help with salary negotiation. The software business has a pretty good reputation when it comes to the gender wage gap. A 2012-2013 salary survey from tech recuitment site Dice showed a minimal difference between the earnings of male and female software engineers. Men earned $95,929 per year as opposed to $87,527 for women in the survey but Dice concluded that the gap was due to different job titles. Average salaries are equal for male and female tech pros, provided we’re comparing equal levels of experience and education and parallel job titles, says the press release. A report from PayScale this year cited similar statistics. In PayScale’s data, median pay for male software engineers in Seattle, for example, was $89,400 while women earn $79,000. Economist Katie Bardaro was quoted in the report as saying that when you control for years of experience and job responsibilities, the wage gap for women decreases to 97 cents on the dollar for men. fastcolabs/3008216/tracking/minding-gap-how-your-company-can-woo-female-coders
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 20:22:34 +0000
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