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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'.