A new research found that the difference between the earnings of men and women in the U.S. technology sector is far more than most other sectors in the country. The findings suggested that the average gender pay gap in this sector is 5.9 percent.
According to the study undertaken by the job recruiting site Glassdoors, on an average women employed in the tech sector in the U.S. earn about 94 cents for each dollar received by their male counterparts. The gender pay gap in the most admired technology jobs is 75 percent, exceeding the adjusted average pay gap of 5.4 percent.
The pay gap is among the several assorted issues faced by the tech companies in the U.S. In fact, Silicon Valley has been confronting hard-hitting questions regarding the manner in which it deals with women and minorities. As a result, the tech sector in the country keeps contending with issues like recruitment, retention as well as promotion.
Often many people attribute the prevailing gender pay gap in the tech sector to the different choices made by men and women. In other words, they imply that that the male-female pay gap exists in the industry just because men and women have opted for different roles, for instance marketing managers versus software engineers, Glassdoor's chief economist Dr. Andrew Chamberlain wrote in a blog on the company's website.
According to Dr. Chamberlain, the common view is that once the issue of roles performed by men and women in the tech industry is explained there will be no gender pay gap. However, this is not true and as the chief economist at Glassdoor it is his job to help erase such misunderstandings, he added.
Meanwhile, Glassdoor CEO and co-founder Robert Hohman told TechRepublic that a detailed analysis of their study revealed that the gender pay gap was inexplicable even in cases where different factors like age, job title and location are regulated. He also said that such gender pay gap is not acceptable in any sector.
The study, based on data from 504,438 salary reports of the U.S.-based full-time employees, found the gender wage gap was worst among computer programmers (28.3 percent), while the game artists (15.8 percent) came next. The other top tech jobs where gender pay gap was above average included information security specialists (14.7 percent) followed by software architects (10.6 percent) and SEO strategists (10.2 percent).
Watch the truth about the gender pay gap in the United States below: