Women’s issues have taken center stage throughout the last year and even more so within the last several months. The conversation gained steam when Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated to represent a major political party in the US presidential election, and then millions of people around the world participated in the Women’s March earlier this year. While these major events have helped to increase awareness, data still shows that little progress has been made when it comes to gender equality in the workplace.
Because Hired collects voluntary demographic data and facilitates the job searching process from the initial interview request all the way to the final job offer, our position within the hiring industry enables us to examine the wage gap in the tech industry. The findings from our analysis of more than 120,000 interview requests and job offers across 8,000 participating companies and more than a million job seekers painted a discouraging picture, but our hope is that organizations reading this will use it as a call to reflect on their own compensation policies and ensure that they are paying their employees fairly.
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The data shows that 63% of the time women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company — and for one out of every ten job openings, companies offered men salaries that were at least 20% higher than those offered to women.
But there is hope for the future: not only are female candidates with four years of work experience or less asking for more money than their male counterparts, they’re getting it. Looking specifically at women with less than one year of experience, we see that they ask for an average of 4% more money than men, and are ultimately offered an average of 8% more. The gender wage gap doesn’t appear until we look at candidates with six years or more of experience.
While it’s important for women to advocate for themselves throughout the hiring process, it’s ultimately up to companies to close the wage gap. To ensure your company isn’t perpetuating wage inequality, hiring managers should refrain from making compensation decisions for new hires based on what that individual was previously making. Instead, companies should create and follow a compensation policy based on credible, third-party salary data that takes skillsets, geography, years of experience and company stage into account. The HR or people ops team should plan to revisit this data every six months to ensure their salaries are still in line with market rates, as well as review internal data to identify any unexplained gender gaps.
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