X

Equal Pay Day: Women in tech are still making less than men

Research from Glassdoor and Hired shows there's more progress to be made in achieving equal pay.

Erin Carson Former Senior Writer
Erin Carson covered internet culture, online dating and the weird ways tech and science are changing your life.
Expertise Erin has been a tech reporter for almost 10 years. Her reporting has taken her from the Johnson Space Center to San Diego Comic-Con's famous Hall H. Credentials
  • She has a master's degree in journalism from Syracuse University.
Erin Carson
3 min read
gettyimages-1067615974.jpg

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day.

Getty Images

While Equal Pay Day might sound like some kind of holiday, it's actually a stark reminder that men and women don't always get paid equal money for equal work.

In fact, when looking at part-time and full-time workers in the US, women earned about 85 percent of what men did in 2018, according to data released in March from the Pew Research Center.

The annual marker, which falls on Tuesday this year, symbolizes how far into this year women would have to work in order to have earned as much as men did in the previous year.

Usually around Equal Pay Day, there's a new offering of research from various sources shedding light on how and why that is. In the tech industry— which regularly grapples with numbers that show it's predominantly made up of white men— disparity in pay is shrinking, but slowly.

Glassdoor, a site that corrals employment information on companies, looked at more than a half million salary reports and found that at the pace we're going, it's going to take 51 years to close the pay gap.  

In its March report, called Progress on the Gender Pay Gap: 2019, Glassdoor found the adjusted pay gap in tech is 5.4 percent, above the national average of 4.9 percent. The adjusted pay gap incorporates factors such as experience and education when comparing the earnings of men and women. While it's improving, the gap has closed just 0.5 percentage point since 2016.

"It's not a surprise that there's still a fairly large gap when you consider the fact that most of the highest paying jobs are still predominantly male," said Daniel Zhao, a senior economist who worked on the report.

Tech recruiting platform Hired also put out a report last week called The State of Wage Inequality in the Workplace, and found that when men are offered the same job role women, they're offered higher salaries 60 percent of the time.

The report also found that in the tech industry, white and Asian women made 97 cents for every dollar white and Asian men made. The amount dropped for black (89 cents) and and Hispanic women (91 cents).

Meanwhile, not all tech workers are convinced there's a problem.

The reported stated that "64% of female survey respondents believe a racial wage gap exists due to racial identity, while 54% of men believe it exists."

Over the years, some companies have set goals to close their pay gaps. Tech companies like Salesforce, Intel and PayPal have all said they've closed their pay gaps.

"There's a cultural phenomenon where women are paid less," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told 60 Minutes in April 2018, when recounting how the company conducted an audit to correct its pay imbalance. (Editor's note: 60 Minutes is owned by CNET's parent company, CBS.)

One reason progress in tech might be slow, Zhao said, is because there are so few women in the field to start with. He said that industries making quicker progress, like the nonprofit world, tend to be already more gender-balanced.

It isn't just money that women are missing out on.

"People spend a third of their lives at their jobs," Zhao said, "a lot of their overall happiness and satisfaction with life is tied up into how they feel about their job… reducing the amount of discrimination and stress is really important."