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Female Computer Programmers Make $0.72 For Every Dollar Made By Male: Study (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader cites an article on The Mercury News' Silicon Beat tech blog: Female computer programmers make 72 cents for every dollar earned by male programmers. That difference is after researchers adjust for factors such as age, education, years of experience, job title, employer and location, according to a new study by Glassdoor (PDF), the jobs and recruiting marketplace, which looked at salary data of more than 500,000 people over 140 professions. The well-known U.S. wage gender gap is 76 cents for every dollar men earn. But women earn 94.6 cents for every man's dollar after adjusting for all factors other than gender. In other words, the wage gap in the U.S. is about 5.4 percent.
This is a terrible summary, though in this case the fault lies with Glassdoor's summary of their own data, rather than slashdot.
If you look at the details in the appendix, you'll see that their sample size for the "Computer Programmer" title was only 138, as compared to 2330 "Software Architects", 3525 "Front-end Engineers", 13461 "Software Engineers", 2199 "Programmer Developers", etc. All of those other job categories had much lower gender pay gaps in the 4-6% range. That's still too large, but it's much better than 28%.
So what really happened here was that the report analyzed based on self-reported job titles and it so happened that a very rarely-used title, computer programmer, with a small sample size, just happened to have an extreme gender pay difference. Personally, I wonder what kind of company calls their people "computer programmers". In my 25 year career I've had a variety of titles, including "Software developer", "Software engineer", "Software architect", "I/T specialist", "I/T architect", "Software team lead", etc. with various other tags attached like "junior", "senior", "consulting" and so on. I have never, ever had "computer programmer" as my official title, and never known anyone else with that title either.
Even in the summary they state the real number: ~ 5%. This is one of those massive myths that keeps going and going. For the same positions, men and women get paid the same amount.
The summary also states that the gap is 28% for programmers, after adjusting for all of the same factors that give the 5% gap overall. So the point of this article is, why is the gap so much worse for programmers than it is for other fields?
It isn't one of these 77 cents on the dollar studies. They did factor for all of that, it even says so in the summary. That's why over all professions, they concluded 94 cents on the dollar. But the study found specifically that female computer programmers get 72 cents on male programmers' dollar.
Say a fair price for a specific job at age 30, with your experience (after taking off 2 years to raise a child) is 86k. But because you are a woman, you get paid only 72k, and a man doing the same job gets paid 100k.
But you are married to a 40 year man. Because he is older, and never took time off to raise the children, he is making 150k. If was female, he would have only earned 108k. A fair price salary would be 129k (half way between 108 and 150). But being male, he makes 150k.
Your combined salary is now 150+72=222k.
Now compare that if you both got a fair salary of 86k+129k = 215k.
That is, a married couple living in a society where women take time off to raise a child, and women marry older men, but everyone gets paid a fair salary regardless of gender, end up making $7,000 less, than if they live in a discriminatory society where men make more than women do.
Gay women get screwed the most as they both get the 14% discount to their value. Gay men make out like bandits because they both get the 14% upgrade. But married couples - and that includes the brides as well as the grooms - are still CLEAR winners in our current system.
As long as the majority of women in our culture expect to get married to an older man, expect to take time off to raise their kids (while their husband keeps working), then they can also expect to benefit from getting a lower salary.
This is despite the fact that the system is clearly and obviously biased and unfair.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Because 'Computer Programmer' in this instance is 'Mainframe Programmer', one of the older 'types' of computer programmer.
More recent job titles that gap is much closer to the national average, it's not a statement on 'everybody who writes code'.
You need to read the article linked.
"Part of the explanation for the large computer programmer wage gap, said Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor, is that these are the scientific programmers, “people who would do coding with mainframe computing or other scientific related computing. It’s one of the older profession.”"
That's straight from glassdoor, who also did the actual study.
If you're going to break out TFA, actually read TFA.