Exploring the Gender Pay Gap

Our recent Navigating Gender Diversity in tech article demonstrated that the gender pay gap is still prevalent in the tech sector.

This report digs further into the gender pay gap across different seniorities and positions, with action points for Talent Managers to help improve this.

Overall Gender Pay Gap

As our previous report showed, there is a 13.8% pay gap between the average expected salaries of women and men on cord.

Pay Gap By Seniority Level

Breaking this down by seniority, there is always a pay disparity at each level. There is also a general trend that this pay gap becomes larger as we progress into higher seniorities

• The lowest pay gap is at Entry level, at 6.1% with a difference of £2,933.

• The pay gap increases with seniority level, peaking at 14.2% for leadership level candidates, which equates to a £15,660 difference.

Even at the start of their careers, women expect a lower salary than men, which only increases throughout tThis gap between expected salary increases at the more senior levels. Not only are women far less represented at these levels, as shown in our Navigating Gender Diversity report, they also aren’t paid as highly.

Most Popular Positions Pay Gap

We next compared the expected salaries for the 10 most popular positions on cord.

• There are two positions here where women on average have a higher expected salary than men: Data Analyst and Engineering Manager.

• The other 8 positions all have a gender pay gap favouring Men, with Front End Developer having the biggest percentage Pay Gap of 14.95%.

• The average % Pay Gap across the most popular tech positions is 5.51%

Most Represented Positions Pay Gap

Our navigating gender diversity report identified the following job titles with the best representation for women.

You might assume that positions where women are most represented would correlate to a smaller pay gap, however, this pay gap is higher than the list of most popular positions, with a 6.5% average.

• The Data Analyst position mentioned above features in this list and is the only position where women’s pay is more than mens

• The biggest disparity is UI Designers, which has a 18.3% Pay Gap.

How can we close this gap?

Salary benchmarking is essential.

You shouldn’t be basing compensation offers on what someone thinks they’re worth, but what their skills are actually worth in the market.

You can use cord’s salary benchmarking tool to accurately benchmark salaries, based on thousands of live data points.

Don’t base an offer on a current salary

Often companies ask candidates their current salary in the hiring process and make an offer a % above that. As we can see, women are already paid less than men in the market. By basing offers on their current salary, rather than updated market data, you’re perpetuating the existing gender pay gap.

Offer career progression

We can see that women are both underrepresented and underpaid at the more senior levels in tech. Focusing on career progression and accompanying salary reviews, based on updated market data, ensures women are paid fairly and all levels.