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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.
The first 2 sentences of the article are:
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
But then the rest of the article disagrees completely:
For every dollar a man in this role earns, this is how much a woman makes:
Game Artist – $0.84
Information Security Specialist – $0.85
Data Specialist – $0.76
Software Architect – $0.89
SEO Strategist – $0.90
Front End Engineer – $0.90
Database Engineer – $0.90
Sharepoint Developer – $0.91
SAP Developer – $0.92
On the upside, two professions in great demand show women doing at or better than the national average:
Software Engineer – $0.94
Mobile Developer – $0.97
I suspect the first sentence should say "That difference is before researchers adjust..." Going further, and reading the linked GlassDoor PDF, I can't even find a 72 cent number in there. So I'm totally confused as to how they got that introduction. Can anyone else make sense of this?
It really isn't hard to figure out. There is a massive pay disparity among programmers. Silicon Valley programmers can make ten to twenty fold what a coder in Nebraska is making. There are a far far larger number of male programmers so they are statistically far more likely to be qualified for those positions.
The field is dominated by young adults. Women are far more likely during this period to be out for lower paid or completely unpaid maternity leave which will skew your numbers even if they are otherwise equally paid.
Women are far more likely to be family focused putting family needs ahead of work needs. Even if the workplace puts no obstacles or prejudice against this and supports it that is going to translate into lower productivity and performance and that is going to be reflected in salary over time.
Last but not least programming and tech in general is a difficult field to get valid data on. It is very difficult to control for how well qualified someone is in tech since the most important factors is the impression of past and current achievement and not degrees or paint by numbers corporate assessment at least beyond entry level or academia which obviously has to value the paper credentials they are selling.