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It's not a poor methodology if you are simply measuring starting salaries only, or if salaries never increase. But it is reckless to make a bold declaration tha
by TheCowboy 13y ago
It's not a poor methodology if you are simply measuring starting salaries only, or if salaries never increase. But it is reckless to make a bold declaration that "there is no gender gap in tech salaries" based on this data.
I don't think it's hard for people to imagine that there is less variance in starting salaries. Reading into this data and thinking it applies to anything beyond that is a guess and should be treated as such with that guess being tested in future studies.
Even if you demonstrate there is no wage discrimination over the course of people's careers, it doesn't account for the huge gender gap in the industry.
- abalone 13y agoRight, it was the blogger who made the error. Very poor reporting, I should say. "7% gender gap in starting tech salaries" would have been a fairer headline.
- demallien 13y agoYes, exactly. I fully believe that there isn't much discrimination in tech at the entry-level. On the other hand, after 20 years in the industry, I have never seen a woman promoted internally. I have seen women climb up the ladder by changing jobs, getting recruited into a higher position, but women never seem to get picked internally to go into senior engineer or team leader positions. That has got to have a major impact on salary by the end of a woman's career.
- 001sky 13y agoThis is actually quite flawed. The correlations between starting salary and continuing salary (at the same company) is close for large and meaningful data partitions. You can glean some of the indights (if you don't have firsthand experience, if you do...this is obvious) from something like this study. The TLDR is that adverse starting points are meaningful for explaining career earnings anomoly. http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html