The gender wage gap continues to be an issue across industries but, according to Glassdoor’s latest analysis, it has begun to shrink — even in the tech industry.
In general, the U.S.’s unadjusted pay gap is 21.4 percent, which means women make $0.79 for every dollar men earn. However, Glassdoor also controls for worker and job characteristics (such as age, education, occupation, and industry). When looking at the controlled numbers, the pay gap falls to 4.9 percent — a slight improvement from Glassdoor’s first analysis in 2016.
On an adjusted basis, men in the information technology industry make 5.4 more money than women. That’s an improvement from 2016 when Glassdoor found the industry’s wage gap to be 5.9 percent. The unadjusted gap is 11.8 percent.
“Although many tech jobs display large gender pay gaps, the overall information technology (or “tech”) industry is close to the U.S. average and falls in the middle of the pack among industries,” Glassdoor wrote in its 2016 report.
The wage gap among computer programmers actually saw the most improvement. In 2016, the wage gap for programmers was 28.3 percent but has since decreased to 11.6 percent. However, Glassdoor notes that it’s still among the occupations with a “larger than average” pay gap.
It’s likely that these numbers also vary depending on race, but Glassdoor doesn’t break data down that way. Still, it’s good to see the tech industry is improving, even if it’s slow.
It’s important that the tech industry begins to focus on improving diversity. Having workforces that aren’t made up of only white men could help fix a lot tech’s problems. Artificial intelligence, for example, has had a number of problems, including Google’s photo search program once identifying Black people as gorillas.
Tech claims that it will help change the future, but there’s nothing new about white men dominating space and thus shaping the world around them. For tech to ever be as innovative as it claims to be, it has to start being inclusive.
