Technology, with its bro culture, has not been a particularly welcoming profession for women. So it is surprising that in the tech sector, the pay gap between women and men is one of the smallest.
Female computer scientists make 89 percent of what men in the same occupation make, controlling for age, race, hours and education, according to data from Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University labor economist and expert on women and the economy. For engineering managers, pay is just about equal for men and women.
Those numbers are significantly better than in other professions, including finance (66 percent), medicine (71 percent) and law (82 percent).
The tech jobs Ms. Goldin analyzed are not just those at Silicon Valley tech companies. They include tech jobs at almost every company, from carmakers to publishers. (Even dairy farmers rely on technology to milk cows these days.)Continue reading the main story
Tech Jobs Have a Narrower Gender Pay Gap
Although women can find tech jobs unwelcoming in some ways, the pay is less lopsided.
A key reason women in tech fare better in terms of salary is that tech jobs tend to offer more flexibility in terms of where and when people work — the most important element in eliminating the pay gap, according to Ms. Goldin’s research. Compared with jobs in business, health and law, people who work in technology and many science jobs have far less pressure to be around at particular times and have face-to-face discussions with colleagues and clients. Writing code at a computer can be done at odd hours and from home.
These characteristics, Ms. Goldin said, result in people being paid in proportion to the hours they work, instead of being paid disproportionately more for working longer hours. “There are work-life notions — you get your job done, you’ve got code to write, you do it,” Ms. Goldin said in an interview.
As a result, women with tech degrees who have young children are less likely to leave their jobs than women with degrees in other areas.
Ms. Goldin was initially skeptical that tech jobs were as beneficial to women as the data implied. So she dug deeper, and concluded that it was the job itself — not selection bias because of the small number of women in tech or features of particular industries — that makes the difference.
Perhaps this data is something that Yahoo and the other tech companies that recently reversed their work-from-home policies, requiring people to show up at the office, should consider.
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