Despite recent pushes for gender pay equality, issues persist in the tech industry. These gender pay gaps between men’s and women’s salaries exist even when other factors, including experience, roles, education and location are controlled for. Despite the past and continuing contributions that women make in technology, the tech industry isn’t leading in this particular arena. In short, there is much work to be done.
To help raise awareness about the gender pay gap and drive the discussion about salary equality, Dice analyzed three years' worth of salary data (along with supplemental panel and market data) to discover the pay differences between men and women in technology. By putting real numbers on display, we can illuminate compensation inequality that transcends regions, states and occupations. These gaps are quite large; in some states, for instance, the pay differential between men and women exceeds $15,000.
With this data, we hope to foster more conversation around pay differentials and create change for the industry as a whole.
Salary Differential by Location
Nearly every U.S. state shows a negative pay differential, meaning that women are paid less than men. While some differentials are wider than others, the data represents an industry-wide issue related to unequal pay, well beyond particular state lines and regions.
Salary Differential by Occupation
At the occupational level, a wider range of pay disparity exists between both common roles, such as Software Engineer, and roles with growing momentum and business-need, such as Data Engineer.
Building a Gender-Diverse Workforce
Historically, the gender pay gap has been attributed to the opportunity gap, meaning women’s opportunity to hold higher-level, higher-paying jobs compared to men. While studies have been published over the years demonstrating the opportunity gap’s connection to gender, our data largely controls for this factor. Occupation pay differentials remain intact when years of experience, education level and location (state) are all taken into account.
Building a gender-diverse workforce leads to a more dynamic work culture and increased creativity. Today, employers are beginning to take note of the different motivators and values that not only attract a gender-diverse workforce, but also retain a broad spectrum of employees. In fact, 44 percent of women respondents cited work-life balance and 33 percent called out enjoyable work culture as motivators they received in 2019. Additionally, 39 percent of women noted remote work options as a key motivator.
In the tech industry, what starts at the biggest companies often trickles down to smaller ones. It’s potentially good news if firms large and small actively attempt to diversify their employee rankings and talent pipelines. However, Dice’s data also makes it clear that these diversity efforts—as halting and incremental as they might seem at moments—aren’t necessarily closing the gender pay gap, especially in crucial roles such as data, security, and software engineering.
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Methodology: To complete this analysis, Dice combined survey data from its 2017-2019 Dice Salary Reports, with supplementary panel data collected for 2019 salary data. Supplemental panel data was obtained to create a more balanced male/female sample size within key markets in 2019 which allowed for hypothesis testing within those markets. The research was conducted by Cypress Research Group.
