Dice Survey: No Gender Bias in Tech Salaries

Riffing on the controversy surrounding Sheryl Sandberg’s book of career advice, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” Dice.com finds no gender bias in tech salaries in its most recent salary survey.

Male IT pros average more than women — $95,929 compared to $87,527 for women – but that’s because men tend to hold different positions than women, it says. Average salaries are equal, it says, for comparable roles when comparing equal levels of experience and education.

It quotes Tom Silver, Dice senior vice president, as saying:

“When it comes to technology employment, it’s a skills-driven marketplace. The ability to apply that know-how to a given problem remains the core of employment – why tech professionals get hired and how they are compensated.”

It also reports that 58 percent of women said they were satisfied with their salary, compared with 56 percent of men.

While it’s great to report no gender difference in salaries for similar positions, a look at the top positions men and women IT pros hold indicates where the real difference lies. Women were more likely to be in roles with fairly normal schedules – not in the top-paying jobs with crazy hours.

In a piece on Yahoo’s ban on at-home work, two professors, Catherine Albison and Shelley Correll, write at CNN:

Yahoo’s new policy may drive workers with family responsibilities, disproportionately women, to quit, leaving it more male, young and childless.

Still, research from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that women engineers were more likely to leave the field because they were uncomfortable with the work culture than for family reasons.

Dice notes that the survey doesn’t explain the difference in IT roles among men and women. But it deals only with the women who stay, not the many reasons women leave the field. At least Cisco, for one, is paying closer attention to that.