Monday, March 30, 2009

Gender Bias In Engineer $alaries

So, Now it has been proved that when it comes to $alaries, engineers are the ones who are most concerned. Let me explain, how i can claim that
A website called Glassdoor.com, launched in June 2008, allows anyone to find and anonymously share reviews, ratings and salary details about specific jobs and employers.
According to Co-founder of this website Tim Besse: Engineers are the site's larget audience. So when the owners of the website thought of making a survey based on the data they collected guess who was their obvious choice:
ENGINEERS :-).
Therefore i can safely say that $alaries are the biggest concern for all ENGINEERS.
Moving on; so this survey was conducted which had around 4200 respondents who reported the engineering salaries in their companies. The gender was an optional question for participants.
This survey revealed a very simple fact: Men for the same job earn more than women.

The survey reveals that at the start of their careers, difference between a man's salary and a woman's salary is not that much but as they both grow in their careers and experience the difference gets larger. Let me give you some numbers to prove that:
For an engineer with less than 3 years of experience in USA: Men take home a salary of US$ 70,533 whereas women earn US$68,233, A very small pay gap of 96.7% and after 10 years on the job, female engineers are making about $99,733 while men are earning $111,877, a pay gap of 89.15 percent, according to the survey. Now the confusing thing in the above results can be :

a small pay gap of 96.17 percent!!!

Well, i really got confused even if you did not. Actually what it means is that the woman's annual salary is 96.17 percent of a man's annual salary. so if you calculate 96.17 percent of US$70,533(
please do the math yourself !!) it would be US$68,233. Same thing applies for the salary for both sexes after 10 years.
There was also a difference in terms of bonuses. According to the survey, a man with 10 or more years on the job received an almost $8,000 bonus, while women received a little more than US$4,000. Men and women with less than three years on the job received about $3,000 and $2,500, respectively. Again proving that men are paid higher even in terms of bonuses. Also most of the women in this survey were working as Software Test Engineer and very few Engineer director. The gender pay gap does not account for job title though!!

You can find the PDF for gender pay gap according to the years of experience here
PDF for Bonus Pay gap according to gender and years of experience here.
Finally
PDF indicating employers with highest percentage of female employees here
Of course all the PDF's above are for engineering jobs (Blog is for engineering salaries remember!;-).

The basic rationale behind starting this website called Glassdoor.com was the fact that 52 percent of people are more likely to share the information about their salaries if they can do so anonymously. The result is obvious: more than 121,000 people have posted information on Glassdoor.com since its launch last year in 2008 according to Co-Founder Tim Besse. This obviously, raises another question about the authenticity of survey i have been talking about all through this article, as the reported salaries are all annonymous and might be fake.
To overcome this problem the site validates e-mail address of everyone who submits the salary information. After this salary report or information is read and statistical algorithms applied to it. If there is any doubt or discrepancy, the salary information is discarded or the user is contacted who submitted the report at the first place. To see the information on this website though one has to post the information about their own salary too.
A very old give and take formula !!!

A lot of CEO's are becoming regular visitor to this website as they want to see how they stand in today's competitive environment. They are like politicians who are concerned about the public image of the company. Basically, what it means is that this website has started to matter to big companies too.
Another reason for my posting this particular post is that a lot of people asked me where i get all the information i post on this Blog about engineering salary. So there you go: a whole article dedicated to the source of information (NOT ALL INFORMATION THOUGH :-).

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