In Tech, Wage Gender Gap Worsens For Women Over Time, and It's Worst For Black Women (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report: According to a new study involving more than 120,000 job offers transacted on Hired, a jobs marketplace for tech workers, the average female candidate is still making less than her male peers for the same work, and sometimes far less. Hired's data shows that 63 percent of the time women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company, with white women offered 4 percent less on average, and women more broadly offered up to 50 percent less in the most extreme examples. Along the same vein, for one out of every 10 job openings that Hired analyzed, companies offered white men salaries that were at least 20 percent higher than those offered to women. According to the American Association of University Women, it might take another 136 years for the pay gap to disappear entirely. Perhaps more illuminating in this new report is what happens to women's salaries over time, and who is receiving the lowest pay of all for the same jobs at the same companies: Latina and black women. [...] It found that white women with four years or less of experience actually ask for more money than their male counterparts -- possibly because they're armed with information about what the market is paying for more entry-level jobs. A gap in the other direction begins to appear in candidates with six or more years of experience, however, with white women in tech both asking for less than their white male counterparts and receiving it. Indeed, over time and across the country, white women in tech earn an average of .90 cents for every dollar made by their male peers for the same work.

Comments

The takeaway

[grasshoppa]

So women ask for less...and they get it.

Newsflash; that isn't discrimination. That's not sexism. That's individuals undervaluing they're worth, and not anyone's fault but the person that does it.

Re:The takeaway

[JoeMerchant]

Did the analysis take into account time off for childbirth and care?

If they say they did, did they do it correctly?

Re:The takeaway

[swillden]

So women ask for less...and they get it.

Newsflash; that isn't discrimination. That's not sexism. That's individuals undervaluing they're worth, and not anyone's fault but the person that does it.

So... women do worse in a system designed decades ago when there were no women in the professional workforce. That is, a system designed around male behavioral norms. Is anyone surprised by that?

The HR organization in my employer did an analysis a few years ago and found that while female engineers and male engineers of the same rank on the career ladder got paid the same (because the HR organization had previously worked hard to make it so), female engineers tended to be of lower rank. Looking more closely, they found that this was mostly caused by the fact that women nominated themselves for promotion at a lower rate. Promotion in my company is initiated by the employee seeking promotion, not by management. Promotion success rates for those who applied were equal or slightly higher for women, as were subsequent job performance ratings. In a followup study they interviewed randomly-selected high-performing engineers of both genders and found that the women were less assertive in all sorts of ways that seem clearly related to societal gender stereotypes -- and remember that this was a set of women working in a male-dominated field, and at the highest level of that field, so they were no shrinking violets.

The HR team attempted to counter this problem with a campaign to both encourage female engineers directly and -- what turned out to be more important -- to educate their managers to be more sensitive to the fact that women are often less assertive, and to actively counter that by regularly encouraging high-performing women to seek promotion. Within a year of initiating this program, they found that promotion application rates had equalized across the genders, with no effect on promotion success rates or subsequent job performance. In addition, they found that promotion application rates for both genders had risen (though women rose more). Subsequent analysis attributed that to managers also putting more effort into encouraging high-performing but non-assertive men.

The promo self-nomination process was designed with typical high-performing male behavioral patterns in mind, which turn out to be slightly different than typical high-performing female behavioral patterns. Nature or nurture, I don't know and don't care. The point is that the system was designed for men and that made it difficult for women to keep up. A slight alteration of the system fixed the problem and women are no longer at a disadvantage (not in that area, at least).

Large statistical basis & perfomance

[supercell]

Since compensation in the private sector is more or less based on performance and since we are talking large statistical samples, might it be that males generally excel at IT functions?

Also for career paths in general, on a large statistical basis, women are much more likely to leave the work for some period of time to raise children or in some cases they marry have a partner that allows them to not work or work part time. This is highly disruptive to their career growth and their compensation. This I suspect, is the majority or any pay discrepancy between males an females on a large statistical scale.

Otherwise, I think the whole this is a political wedge to gain votes. I am a business owner and I suspect all business owners are going to hire the lowest cost, yet most productive employees they can. If women were willing to work for less and were such great deals, all companies would hire women exclusively. This argument falls flat.

Re:Hire only women and minorities!

[religionofpeas]

For some reason, corporations prefer to hire expensive white men, rather than cheap black women.

Re:A woman and I were paid the same

[Frobnicator]

There are many books on that, like "Women Don't Ask" and "Nice Girls Don't Get The Corner Office", where economists and business researches study why it happens. Several books on the topic propose that nearly all of the gender gap comes from women not asking for wages or negotiating for themselves.

Simply, men ask for bonuses, promotions, and raises about 4x more than women do. Men ask for more with each request, about 2x more than women do.

(Obviously there are exceptions to the groups. Some men don't ask, and some women do ask, but overall the trends are quite clear.)

Men are more likely to negotiate their wages at hire, nearly 8x more likely to negotiate. Some women will negotiate, but few do. Of those who do negotiate, most women will ask for less; perhaps for one job a man may initially ask for $10,000 more, the fewer women who ask for the same role are more likely to start at $6,000 or $4,000 or less. Men are more likely to ask for raises and promotions out of cycle, roughly 6x more likely to ask for a raise or bonus or promotion after completing an assignment or project. It is quite common for men to quietly approach their boss with: "I finished the project, I'd like a raise", or "That contract is complete, I'd like a bonus", or "I just landed this deal for the company worth $x, I'd like a bonus for that." Women almost never do that. (The stats come from several studies in the books mentioned above.)

When performance reviews come around, men usually write more self-praise, take credit for accomplishments, and ask firmly for a large raise and bonus; women tend to deflect praise to the team and ask for minimal rewards, often even asking less than COLA (effectively taking a pay cut). In reviews, I've seen that women are also more likely to list their faults and problems and areas for improvement instead of listing their accomplishments.

Men usually take an active role in talking with their bosses to get the raises and promotions and bonuses. Women will often talk to their peers, particularly to their female co-workers, but will usually assume that their actions speak for themselves and not mention it to the boss. Of course, the boss sees a team where everything is working well, hears no complaints, hears no requests for more money and promotions, and lets the team carry on.

The various authors point out that it isn't due to a lack of negotiating skill, it applies even to fields in marketing and law where persuasive negotiation is critical and the women are well-trained, yet for many reasons women tend not to negotiate on their own behalf.