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Men vs. Women: Their salaries uncovered

Numerous tech companies have admitted they aren't aren't as diverse as they want to be, and they are making a point to solve it. But when it comes to gender and wages there is still an imbalance across the technology workforce.

The gender wage gap is a global issue. The World Economic Forum's 2014 wage gap index found countries like Iceland, Finland, Norway - and even Nicaragua, Rwanda and the Philippines - are leading the way with equal pay for men and women of similar experience levels in similar jobs, but the rest of the world has work to do.

But in Australia, men get a jump start right out university with their degrees earning them 9.4% more than women with the same degree, while in Singapore, large creative companies pay men 15% more than women on average.

In America, a new report by Glassdoor has delved a little bit deeper into the wage gap between men and women at companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco and more.

It has found that in many companies, women with similar experience levels in the same job are still paid less. For example, a female senior software engineer at Google earns $25,000 less per year than a man in the same job.

However, there are few things which need to be pointed out. Glassdoor's survey is not flat - meaning that for each job mentioned at different companies, the average male and female salaries are heavily dependent on years of experience.

So, the average female senior software engineer at Google might earn $25,000 less than a man in the same job, but the men who divulged their details to Glassdoor had around 2.1 more years of experience.

GD_TechCompany_GenderSalaryComparison_Final-1

 

However, when women display more experience than men, it doesn't necessarily mean they are paid more.

Almost across the board at Cisco, the women featured in this survey have significantly more experience than the men - but this isn't reflected hugely in their salaries.

At HP, the average female software engineer with nearly 10 years' experience earns $91,730, but a man in the same job with less experience at 8.5 years earns $96,423.

The story is the same at Oracle, where women around 6% less than men in the same job, despite having nearly two years' more experience.

However, some companies appear to be correcting the imbalance (or perhaps it has never been much of an issue - this isn't clear from the survey).

At Microsoft, male and female software engineers with roughly the same amount of experience earn similar wages - with women actually taking home slightly more pay in some cases. The only time this isn't true is with the most senior role, where men (who have two years' more experience) earn nearly $10,000 more per year. The same is also true at Intel.

The study also looked into employee satisfaction by gender and found that at just four of the 25 tech companies, women are more satisfied with their job than men. Men are more satisfied at 15 of the companies, while at six of the firms featured the satisfaction levels were the same.

Women also reported being slightly less satisfied on average than men in four key areas - senior leadership, culture and values, career opportunities and work-life balance.

Image: Shutterstock

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