According to a new study involving more than 120,000 job offers transacted on Hired, a jobs marketplace for tech workers, the average female candidate is still making less than her male peers for the same work, and sometimes far less.
Hired’s data shows that 63 percent of the time women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company, with white women offered 4 percent less on average, and women more broadly offered up to 50 percent less in the most extreme examples. Along the same vein, for one out of every 10 job openings that Hired analyzed, companies offered white men salaries that were at least 20 percent higher than those offered to women.
It’s both terrible yet unsurprising. According to the American Association of University Women, it might take another 136 years for the pay gap to disappear entirely.
Perhaps more illuminating in this new report is what happens to women’s salaries over time, and who is receiving the lowest pay of all for the same jobs at the same companies: Latina and black women.
Indeed, unlike its inaugural study last year, Hired has segmented job applicants more narrowly this time, including by age and ethnicity. It found that white women with four years or less of experience actually ask for more money than their male counterparts — possibly because they’re armed with information about what the market is paying for more entry-level jobs.
A gap in the other direction begins to appear in candidates with six or more years of experience, however, with white women in tech both asking for less than their white male counterparts and receiving it. Indeed, over time and across the country, white women in tech earn an average of .90 cents for every dollar made by their male peers for the same work.
Less transparency into what their peers are making is one possible driver, suggests Hired’s lead data scientist, Jessica Kirkpatrick. “Women at the outset might have a better idea of what appropriate salary expectations are for an entry-level job, but as they have fewer peers to compare themselves with against [as their careers evolve], it may be less clear what they should be paid.”
A raft of other factors are likely at play, too, says Kirkpatrick, citing unconscious bias during the interview process and the motherhood penalty that sometimes impacts women who take time away from their careers to rear children.
Either way, far worse is the pay gap facing Latina and black women, suggests Hired. According to its calculations, black women earn 79 cents on the dollar to white men — twice as large as the gap between white men and white women. Hispanic women fare only slightly better, earning 83 cents for every dollar made by their white male counterparts.
Kirkpatrick says she hopes Hired’s study “helps raise awareness so that individuals can adjust what they are asking for, and clients and companies can recognize that this is a systematic issue and adjust their practices to be more equitable.”
In the meantime, she adds, the company’s data “does shows that if you are an underrepresented racial minority, bias compounds to become doubly discriminatory.”
You can scan its findings here.