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.

Comments

Bullshit

[SensitiveMale]

No wonder it was submitted by anonymous.

Re:Bullshit

[SumDog]

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.

Women do have trouble with confidence. There's a great Salon article called The Confidence Gap that addresses this. Women have to walk the line between assertive and "bitchy." Oddly enough, women in focus groups are more likely to label an assertive woman as bitchy than men!. A lot of this comes from their own gender!

Women also tend to take jobs that are more fulfilling, even if it's at a lower pay. In some respect I think men could learn a lot from this. That's really the smarter move.

Re:Bullshit

[Dragonslicer]

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?

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bullshit

[bfpierce]

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'.

Re:Bullshit

[bfpierce]

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.

Negotiating

[JackieBrown]

Maybe men are better at negotiating salary. Negotiating makes a huge difference. When I was promoted at my last job, I did not negotiating because I was afraid I wouldn't be given the job. The person (a lady) who was promoted next did negotiate and started about 5 thousand more than me.

I'd be interested to see what the starting offer was for men and woman and what disparity was there.

Re:Negotiating

[Anonymous Coward]

"A 2005 study by Linda Babcock, Hannah Riley Bowles and Lei Lai supports this explanation for why women may be less likely to negotiate their starting salaries. The study found a substantial social backlash towards women who negotiated. Women who negotiated were penalised, with both men and women evaluators expressing less desire to work with or hire them":

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf
"Four experiments show that gender diVerences in the propensity to initiate negotiations may be explained by diVerential treatment
of men and women when they attempt to negotiate. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants evaluated written accounts of candidates
who did or did not initiate negotiations for higher compensation. Evaluators penalized female candidates more than male
candidates for initiating negotiations. In Experiment 3, participants evaluated videotapes of candidates who accepted compensation
oVers or initiated negotiations. Male evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations;
female evaluators penalized all candidates for initiating negotiations. Perceptions of niceness and demandingness explained resistance
to female negotiators. In Experiment 4, participants adopted the candidate’s perspective and assessed whether to initiate negotiations
in same scenario used in Experiment 3. With male evaluators, women were less inclined than men to negotiate, and
nervousness explained this eVect. There was no gender diVerence when evaluator was female."

https://hbr.org/2014/06/why-women-dont-negotiate-their-job-offers/
"However, in most published studies, the social cost of negotiating for pay is not significant for men, while it is significant for women... Women get a nervous feeling about negotiating for higher pay because they are intuiting — correctly — that self-advocating for higher pay would present a socially difficult situation for them — more so than for men."

https://www.wgea.gov.au/sites/default/files/20131206_PP_womennegotiation_1.pdf
"Studies have shown that women’s reluctance to enter negotiations is partly because they are penalised more than men for doing so.15 Because negotiation involves agentic behaviours, women who negotiate must operate outside prescribed gender norms, and can experience backlash for doing so in the form of economic and social penalties (e.g., they can be viewed as hostile, selfish, devious and quarrelsome).16 Women who negotiate agentically can bedisliked and some colleagues may not want to work with them.17 This loss of social capital has economic implications for these women who may not be hired or offered promotions, despite being competent, because they are perceived as lacking in social skills.18 Women are aware of this backlash and try to avoid it.19 The more women anticipate backlash, the less inclined they are to initiate negotiations.20"

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959781400048X
"As expected, negotiators deceived women more so than men, thus leading women into more deals under false pretenses than men."

http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/34/2/186
"Women experience social and economic penalties (i.e., backlash) for self-promotion, a behavior that violates female gender stereotypes yet is necessary for professional success. However, it is unknown whether and how the threat of backlash interferes with women's ability to self-promote."

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00306.x/pdf
" We review research demonstrating the Catch-22 that female leaders face, such that they are required to display agency to overcome the lack of fit between their gender and leadership yet when they do so, they risk prejudice and hiring discrimination (i.e., backlash)."

Ob

[Hognoxious]

So they're overpaid?

More f'ing advocacy research...

[Anonymous Coward]

When the first line of the "report" is:

'It is a well established fact that men and women are paid unequally.'

Is it any wonder that their "research" finds that men and women are paid equally?

The solution seems clear

[Anonymous Coward]

If I, as a business owner, can save 28% salary costs on my employees by exclusively hiring women, why would I *ever* hire a man? If women are equal in performance and skill, there is no reason for me to hire men.

and the HB1 makes 0.60 + 60-80 hours a week

[Joe_Dragon]

and the HB1 makes 0.60 + 60-80 hours a week

The article is self-contradictory

[MobyDisk]

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?

Missed the important part

[cirby]

"Further, comparing workers with the same job title, employer and location, the gender pay gap in the U.S. falls to 5.4 percent (94.6 cents per dollar)."

Oddly enough, while they adjust for "everything," they don't mention things like:

Maternity leave
Taking time off to pick up kids after school
(Men often do these sorts of things, but be realistic - women take more time off to handle their families)

They also include "years of experience," but they don't allow for "years of experience with gaps due to taking time off for family."

The study compares a lot of different things, and boils it down to "amount paid in base salary." But they leave out the most important part: "hours actually worked." While this doesn't directly affect base pay, it affects small pay differences because the employer knows that the male employee will end up working more - and more consistent - hours. Thus the less-than six-percent difference.

Terrible summary

[shawn2772]

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.

Re:Terrible summary

[jasnw]

Mod+2 if I had mod points. This summary is statistical cherry-picking at its worst. Gives those who want to rant about misleading gender-bias studies something to rant about rather than helping sort out a fix for the remaining 5% or so pay offset.

Re:Terrible summary

[shawn2772]

Statistical cherry-picking is a great concise explanation of the problem. I wish I'd used it. What happened here is almost worse than cherry-picking, though, since it seems to have been more clueless than targeted. It appears that what Glassdoor did was run the numbers, sort by gender gap (ignoring questions of sample size) and then shout about the one that came out on top. It would actually be very surprising if none of the small categories turned out to show some extreme behavior.

Really, what's more interesting is some of the other high-disparity jobs that do have a sufficiently-large sample size to make you think there's a chance that the data is good. Such as "C Suite" (870 reports, 27.7%), "Pharmacist" (904 reports, 21.8%) and "CAD Designer" (1044 reports, 21.5%). A gender gap among pharmacists seems particularly surprising to me.

Though you still have to keep in mind that this is all subject to really significant bias, since the data is all self-reported by self-selected people.

Re:Right

[iggymanz]

sad news for you, women have a kind of "stealth penis" that develops from the same tissues as your dong during gestation. They can even discretely masturbate it with thigh movements while typing code, while you have to work one-handed!

Meanwhile, in Canada

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Programmers make $0.75 US dollar for every Canadian dollar they earn.