Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. As of 2022, women earn, on average, about 82% of what men earn which is only a 2% increase from 2002, according to Pew Research. Women are highly underrepresented in STEM fields, even more so in managerial roles, making up only 27% of the workforce in those industries, combined, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This trend is not limited to women in tech. It is a fact that women are increasingly and deeply underrepresented in higher-paying positions. Pull up the median pay data for any industry, not just tech, and the problem becomes quite clear. Studies have also found that companies which disclose the pay gaps are more likely to fix them compared to those that do not.

According to a 2021 survey by Hired, men in tech were offered higher salaries than women for the same job title 59% of the time. On average, women in tech were offered salaries 2.5% less than the ones that men were given for the same roles. Women also suffered a greater job loss compared to men during the pandemic. Reports say that about five million women have lost their jobs since February 2020. A slight ray of hope comes from a 2021 survey by MetLife which found that of the women who were considering coming back to the workforce post-pandemic, 8 in 10 said that they would like to change their careers and pursue something in STEM now.

There are also representational issues, which researchers say, has an enormous impact on the paychecks women receive. Women in tech have extremely low representation, which only gets lower as we move up the ladder. This, in turn, pushes average and median salaries for women in tech way below that of men, who are well-represented at all tiers. On the other side, women also negotiate less, and when they do, they are hardly ever as aggressive as men are when negotiating the salaries. Put it all together, and it creates a multiplier effect which collectively pushes salaries down for all women.