We live in the 21st century, and as such you would hope that gender, race, and sexuality doesn’t impact how much a person can make. Unfortunately, it seems we still have a long way to go.
A recent study published by Hired suggests that almost two in three women in tech are paid a lower salary for the same job than their male counterparts. That’s a little better than last year, when 69 percent of women were paid less compared to 63 percent this year, but the figures show there’s still a lot of work to be done.
For the study, Hired looked at data from 120,000 salary offers to 27,000 different candidates at 4,000 different tech companies. In general, 75 percent of the applicants were men — and Hired found that a whopping 53 percent of the time, companies only interviewed men, compared to 6 percent of the time when only women were interviewed.
In general, women were paid 4 percent less than men for the same job, but gender isn’t the only differentiator researchers looked at. Asian men were paid 96 cents for ever dollar a white man made, while Latino men were paid 92 cents. White women were paid 90 cents, and black men were paid 88 cents. Asian women made 87 cents, and Latina women made 83 cents. Finally, black women made only 79 cents for every dollar a white man made.
In addition to the inequality in gender and race when it comes to pay in the tech industry, researchers also looked at sexualities, finding that LGBTQ individuals made less than their non-LGBTQ counterparts.
Of course, its in the companies’ best interests to pay people the same for the same job. For example, the report noted that by paying less to nonwhite men, companies are harming their job retention rate.
Things may be getting slightly better, but better really isn’t good enough. It’s long past time for pay inequality to be a thing of the past.
