Startups Have Smaller Gender Wage Gap than Large Corporations: Report
Companies offer women three percent less than men for the same roles in technology, sales, and marketing, with some companies offering as low as 30 percent less, according to new data from Hired, released this week.
The report includes data from more than 100,000 job offers across 15,000 candidates and 3,000 companies on Hired’s platform, which is a marketplace for employers to make employees job offers.
Hired found that 69 percent of the time, men receive higher salary offers than women for the same job title at the same company. It recommends companies “combat this phenomenon by determining an individual’s salary based on the market value for his or her skills, experience and location, instead of current wages, which could be influenced by past biases or inequities.”
Wage inequality and the gender wage gap in particular have received a lot of criticism in the tech world over the years, but this study shows there is still a ways to go in terms of closing the salary gap between men and women. Earlier this month, in line with Equal Pay Day, Microsoft and Facebook both touted their efforts is making sure men and women are paid the same.
Looking at software engineer salary offers at companies of different sizes, Hired found that smaller bootstrapped and seed stage companies have a gender wage gap half that of larger corporations. The report suggests this could be because smaller companies have more institutional transparency into everyone on the team, and that they have less flexibility around base salary.
The report also looks at the “expectation gap” – overall, the average woman sets her expected salary at $14K less per year than the average man on Hired’s platform.
The good news is that the wage gap seems to be closing with the younger generation. Women with less than two years of experience are asking for an average of two percent more compensation than men, and final salaries for junior women are 7 percent higher than junior men.
