
There is no gender gap in tech salaries - goronbjorn
http://qz.com/182977/there-is-no-gender-gap-in-tech-salaries/
======
simonsarris
I'm a little surprised that there is a serious concern that this article
doesn't address with gender-gapped salaries, though, and it's been touched
upon several times on HN. Women tend to negotiate starting salaries and raises
_much less_ than men do, to the point where it can skew wage statistics by a
nontrivial amount.

There was someone on HN a while ago who hired several engineers, and said that
his company pays women less than men because he makes the same starting offer
to several people, and almost _all_ the men asked for more money, yet none of
the women did. So the offers the company made were "fair", but the end results
were very skewed wages.

There are entire books about this subject, such as "Women Don't Ask: The High
Cost of Avoiding Negotiation"[1]

Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation (Didn't Fog
Creek do this?), or making all employees salaries transparent (countries like
Norway do this, and we do this for C-levels often in the US, just not plain
old employees).

I suspect nothing institutional will change though because it would ultimately
cost companies money. They benefit too much from workers who negotiate poorly.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553383876](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553383876)

~~~
tomsaffell
When I started dating my (now) wife, she didn't negotiate her salary, and was
at a company where other people did. I helped her figure out what to ask for,
how to negotiate, and how to feel good about it. We built a spreadsheet to arm
her with some data (e.g. salary compared to inflation). It worked.

I hope by mentioning it that other people might do similarly.

~~~
ed209
sounds great. Any chance of a quick how-to? I'm a male and I've never
negotiated a salary either.

~~~
fleitz
As with anything it's about practice, negotiation is an art. For an unskilled
negotiator the best thing to know is your BATNA.

A great rule of thumb is if people aren't saying no you didn't ask for enough.

The first time I negotiated I shot way over, apparently even the lawyer didn't
make that much, my reply was that the lawyers work usually wasn't scalable
across multiple clients and that any code I made was a capital good that could
be resold again and again generating value in the company for years, then I
pulled out a sales spreadsheet showing how the code I wrote for various
product lines brought additional revenue to the company and then multiplied by
the average length on the contract. (Make a really big number and ask for a
small part of it).

Needless to say I was so successful in my negotiations that I was no longer
allowed to have access to sales data.

The best part is once you negotiate a good salary you can use it in future
negotiations as an indication of skill to get even better salaries. (eg. Does
the competitor want to steal the $50K per year coder, or the $250K per year
coder?)

~~~
ssharp
For salary negotiation, I don't think knowing your BATNA is that helpful. Your
BATNA is either accepting their initial offer or walking away.

I think your best course of action is to gather up salary data based on the
job responsibilities of the job you're applying for. There are lots of online
resources for researching salaries and you'll be able to grab data points like
median, and quartiles. You can then massage that number up or down based on
extra criteria like your unique skills, additional education, etc.

In any negotiation, finding objective criteria that you can show will always
put you in a stronger position than creating semi-arbitrary bargaining
positions.

The other best advice I could offer to would-be negotiators is to avoid
setting any initial price until it's no longer reasonable to avoid it. If you
have to name a price, name a price you're going to be very happy with.

~~~
fleitz
My BATNA has rarely ever been accepting their offer, it's usually been already
having an offer in hand, or having a bunch of interviews lined up in the
coming days.

Objective criteria a horrible way to negotiate, look up the accounting term
'good will', you create 'good will' by not using objective criteria.

Name a price they will say no to, not one you're happy with, if they counter
below your BATNA, tell them the mininum you'll accept is something above your
BATNA, give them a timeframe to come correct, get up from the table and leave.

I could careless how badly the average, or 5th percentile employee is paid. If
they want to retain me they'll a price better than my BATNA.

~~~
ssharp
BATNA is best alternative to a negotiated agreement, meaning, it's what
happens if you don't agree. So really, a BATNA in a salary negotiation for a
new position is not taking the position. In an existing position where you're
going for a raise, your BATNA is quitting.

BATNA isn't a bargaining position, it's your fallback option in case
bargaining fails. I think you're talking more about your "bottom line", which
is the lowest number you're willing to accept. A good negotiator goes in
knowing his/her BATNA and bottom-line, but they're separate concepts.

I also completely disagree with you disregarding objective criteria. I used my
recent purchase of a 2-year old vehicle as a way to gain some extra experience
in negotiating and work on different approaches with two separate dealers. My
initial approach with the dealer I ultimately bought from, was to derive my
bottom-line number from objective criteria, but to show no strong evidence to
how I got the numbers I was offering. I got nowhere with that approach. The
sales manager didn't even come out to stop me from leaving when negotiations
with the salesman got nowhere. We were only $1,000 from my bottom-line (which
he didn't know) and about $1,800 away from our stated positions.

I came back a few days later with reasonable evidence based on market data of
the particular model I was buying, as well as reasons why I'd go spend more
money on another manufacturers' similar, but nicer model in the same class.
They ended up coming down the full $1,800 after I was about to walk away
again.

This works time and time again. Unless you're in a position where you
completely don't care if you complete a purchase/sale/agreement, then holding
onto unrealistic positions will never get you very far. My father-in-law likes
to buy and sell stuff, but he pretty much only deals in unrealistic offers,
and he rarely ends up buying or selling anything, even though he spends a
decent amount of time looking.

------
adamwong246
It's nice to see woman writing on this subject. As a man, you'd be a fool to
say such things in public. The social fallout from uttering these unpopular
ideas will earn you only contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a
twitter witch hunt.

~~~
bdg
> The social fallout from uttering these unpopular ideas will earn you only
> contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a twitter witch hunt.

I agree. The fact I have a penis attached to me means that I don't get to
participate equally with all conversation partners. So while I'm all for
equality, I keep quiet about things I both disagree and agree with, because my
opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit a priori.

~~~
rayiner
I gotta say I don't buy this. I was the token conservative on a lot of issues
in grad school and I never got flack for saying my opinion on gender or race
or economic issues as an Asian male from a privileged background. Not being an
asshole about it works wonders.

~~~
bowlofpetunias
It also helps if you do not pre-emptively open a full frontal attack on
others, like the previous two posters did with "twitter witch hunt" and "my
opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit".

Such people aren't interested in having a constructive discussion in the first
place, make that perfectly clear in the same sentence as in which they express
their opinion, and then proceed to act indignant if the other side responds in
kind...

~~~
bdg
My feelings are invalid and actually just an attack?

------
rayiner
I agree with the decision to leave "makes the same career choices" out of the
equation, but I think people have to admit a lot of those "choices" aren't
free from gender based social pressure. My wife's attitude going into
parenthood was that she was going to "parent like a father." This was a
necessary consequence of us both maintaining busy careers, but I have to say
that I make out a lot better in peoples' eyes for doing the same level of
parenting. I take the night feedings? I'm some sort of wizard dad. She
prepares the lunch for daycare? Why doesn't she make this or that toddler
puree? When a stranger glares for our daughter not wearing socks in the cold
(I swear she had them on when we left the house!), its never at me, always
her. As a result, she's racking up a non-trivial amount of working mom guilt.
She doesn't want to mommy track her career, but it irritates her that if she
did people would support her decision in a way they wouldn't if I did the
same.

~~~
fibbery
As someone who will be in the same position as your wife not too far from now,
this is both good to know and frustrating. Have you ever had people refer to
your taking care of the kids as "baby sitting"? I've heard that one is common.

~~~
rayiner
That sort of comment just sets the bar low for what's expected of me.
Meanwhile, my wife wants to be perceived as a good parent too, but she can't
get too invested in that because she can't reconcile her career with all the
baby wearing/toddler puree/breastfeeding until two stuff that's the benchmark
in her circle of mommy friends.

------
ameister14
I posted this in another thread, but it's valid here as well:
[http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09279.pdf](http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09279.pdf)

Basically, in a study of federal workers, a 7% unexplained gap exists between
male and female worker's wages when controlling for occupational, experiential
and educational differences, among other things.

Especially relevant data is on pages 84-86.

(edited for clarity)

~~~
twistedpair
At least it's no longer an integer multiple difference between male and female
wages.

But why would we ever expect them to be 0% different? Recall that natural
unemployment is ~3%. The market and real world are not perfectly efficient and
making them perfectly efficient would make them less efficient in the process.

~~~
ameister14
Yeah, sorry I wasn't more clear; specifically the difference is one of wages,
not overall employment level.

I wouldn't expect uncontrolled wages to be entirely equal. I would expect that
eventually controlling for employment history, experience, education etc.
would make the difference approach zero, though. I think that'd be good.

------
abalone
Very poor methodology. The study only looked at first year salaries and the
author extrapolated from there. Totally invalid.

~~~
TheCowboy
It's not a poor methodology if you are simply measuring starting salaries
only, or if salaries never increase. But it is reckless to make a bold
declaration that "there is no gender gap in tech salaries" based on this data.

I don't think it's hard for people to imagine that there is less variance in
starting salaries. Reading into this data and thinking it applies to anything
beyond that is a guess and should be treated as such with that guess being
tested in future studies.

Even if you demonstrate there is no wage discrimination over the course of
people's careers, it doesn't account for the huge gender gap in the industry.

~~~
abalone
Right, it was the blogger who made the error. Very poor reporting, I should
say.

"7% gender gap in starting tech salaries" would have been a fairer headline.

~~~
demallien
Yes, exactly. I fully believe that there isn't much discrimination in tech at
the entry-level. On the other hand, after 20 years in the industry, I have
_never_ seen a woman promoted internally. I have seen women climb up the
ladder by changing jobs, getting recruited into a higher position, but women
never seem to get picked internally to go into senior engineer or team leader
positions. That has got to have a major impact on salary by the end of a
woman's career.

------
collyw
One thing that is interesting is that "their sample was restricted to those
under 35 years old receiving a first bachelor’s degree".

I wonder how how it would look after that age range.

I am guessing from my anecdotal experience that most professional women
usually wait until around that sort of age to have children, and how much
having children is a factor in gaining higher salaries.

In addition to that, I am guessing that people early in their careers are less
likely to negotiate salary. I certainly was. Now I have a fair bit of
experience, I can see that I am more knowledgeable and valuable than some of
my colleagues, and so I am in a position to negotiate, with good reasons to
back it up. Graduating in the dot-com bust, I was happy just to get a job
after nearly a year and a half of searching. I didn't feel I was in any
position to negotiate then.

------
velis_vel
> Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling
> for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation,
> economic sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as
> opposed to one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade
> point average, undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age,
> geographical region, and marital status.

The problem with controlling for _all_ those things is that you leave out
other factors; for example, if men were preferentially hired over women, that
wouldn't show up in this data.

~~~
ameister14
That's true, but we're talking about equal pay for equal work.

Such a case would definitely be discrimination, it just wouldn't be germane.

------
sonnyz
I think it's wonderful that it's uncommon for there to be a gap in salaries
based on gender. This is something I've paid close attention to over the past
8 years. My wife and I are both software developers with roughly the same
level of experience and expertise. So far it seems like the person with the
highest salary is usually the one that most recently changed jobs, since
negotiating a new salary is much easier then negotiating a large raise.

------
Spooky23
IMO, this is all about the tech market being more about skills than seniority.

My wife was out on unpaid leave for nearly two years when we had our first
child. That meant that she missed two salary scale steps, which are earned
based on satisfactory performance over a period of at least 1,500 paid
hours/year. In her case, that means that a male who started the same day as
her makes approximately $2,500 more than her, assuming the same career path.
(She started at level-x and is at level-x+y.)

For a nurse, or techie, salary is driven by the market in most cases.

~~~
PeterisP
If you're doing such a comparison, then it points towards a salary system
that's working as it should, but a disbalance in gender roles in childcare -
which can be fixed not by changes to salaries, but by changes in childcare
policies such as those successfully implemented by Sweden and others, where
male nurses in similar situation as your wife would take time off comparable
to female nurses. They'd still be behind childless workers, though.

That's how it works, if your family is more valuable to you than your career,
then you'd be happy with getting more family at the tradeoff of less career -
and that explains why the positions at the very top get a disproportionally
large number of divorces/etc - if someone is consistently neglecting family
because of their career, then they do get to the top easier than someone who'd
sometimes actually prefer going home to their kids.

------
NinjaEconomics
My article in Quartz didn't address all of the reasons women earn less than
men do because of space constraints. Also, the article was discussing new
research on pay equality in STEM fields, with a summary on gender wage gap as
background.

It is interesting to discuss whether there is more pay equality in STEM
fields, specifically engineering, because females in these fields are also
more comfortable with (and better at) negotiating higher salaries for
themselves. At the moment there isn't research to suggest this but it could be
a contributing factor.

\- @NinjaEconomics

------
codr
Looks like there's a 6.6% salary gap?

"When controlled for all factors other than gender, the earnings difference
between men and women is about 6.6%, something most people don’t know."

~~~
jldugger
That's across all occupations.

------
iamwithnail
Mildly ridiculous to draw the line at35 though, which will be around the time
a lot of high performing women will have kids.

~~~
gaius
If a person, male or female, takes some significant amount of time off work,
for any reason, should that person continue to accrue seniority, be considered
for raises and promotion, equally to colleagues who _didn 't_ take the time
off, who were working and contributing?

Strip the gender politics out of it and the answer is very obviously no.

~~~
iamwithnail
That's my point really; women are still expected to bear the brunt of child
rearing, so pay the financial penalty. Cf Norwegian policies and smaller
gender pay gap.

~~~
gaius
_Women_ aren't expected to do anything; the proof is that birth rates are
falling all across the developed world.

Consider two women, A doesn't want children and B does. How do you think A
will feel having worked hard for a year while B was on maternity leave, only
to find that B's seniority etc has kept up with zero effort or contribution to
the company on her part?

------
Carioca
Here's an interesting analysis: [http://www.metafilter.com/126704/with-
numbers-like-these-why...](http://www.metafilter.com/126704/with-numbers-like-
these-why-would-women-want-to-work-in-games#4905768)

------
callesgg
But three is a gender distribution that is of the charts.

------
michaelochurch
I think there is, but I can't prove it. I have anecdotes about specific
companies, and some companies are viciously sexist while others aren't. Most
of the sexism comes from the mainstream business culture (what I sometimes
call "MBA culture" but that's not entirely fair because some MBAs are fine)
and not from tech itself. (Brogrammers are trying to be ballers, not hackers.)
The more "corporate" a tech company is, the more it will be sexist. Often this
isn't overt, so much as an artifact; women get the shaft not because of
explicit sexism but because they don't negotiate for themselves or elbow their
way on to the best projects.

 _Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling
for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation, economic
sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as opposed to
one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade point average,
undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age, geographical region,
and marital status._

That's really misleading. Some of those variables at least _might_ have gender
baked into them. For one example, let's say that women are more likely to have
longer unemployment spells after college. (I don't know if this is true.) Then
there could be zero gender correlation in the model not because there is none,
but because that input factors it out.

With 11 variables, some of those being categories, you're going to almost
certainly have "small data" issues on real world datasets, where the inputs
(empirical "design matrix") are not even remotely orthogonal. So pardon me if
I don't buy it.

The issue isn't that companies explicitly choose to pay women poorly. It's
that many tech companies end up with shitty cultures that exclude women, which
leaves them out of the loop and causes them to end up on shitty projects. It
doesn't happen by intention. The leadership of most tech companies is
criminally negligent on _a lot_ of cultural issues, but not explicitly sexist.

ETA: it's also worth pointing out the "women don't negotiate" argument. I
think this is because they get worse results. My wife is a better negotiator
than I am, in terms of skill level, but whenever we have to haggle on the
price of something, I go out... and I often get more, not because I am better,
but because a 6' male is more intimidating.

------
caiob
Are we still discussing the whole women vs men in tech thingy? I miss when HN
used to discuss real issues.

------
undoware
Yes, just statistical gaps in who gets those salaries.

Wake me when there's justice.

------
anovikov
In the coder freelancing world, women easily command higher wages than men do
(and with reason). Easy proof is that there seem to be a lot of female
freelancer profiles on sites like odesk.com, but most of them hide a man
behind them (just try to make them do a voice call). Because guys know women
are better paid. I have never heard of reverse.

