Tech is one of the fastest growing industries in the UK, but findings reveal women are not being given the same pay and interview opportunities as their male counterparts
- London showed the widest gender wage gap with women being offered £0.91 for every £1.00 offered to men in 2021
- In 2021 women only received 17% of the interview requests from tech positions
- Women are offered lower salaries than their male counterparts 62% of the time
- More than one-third of positions (38%) sent interview requests only to male candidates
- Women have a wider ‘expectation gap’ when it comes to salaries, underestimating their desired salary by 5% compared to men invited to interview for the same roles
Hired, an AI-driven marketplace matching tech and sales talent with top companies, today released its annual State of Wage Inequality in the Tech Industry: Hired’s 2022 Impact Report. The wage gap – the difference in salaries between two defined demographic groups – across gender is narrowing, but still prevalent.
Every year, Hired’s Impact Report finds there is a strong link between the wage gap and salary expectations of underrepresented candidates. Tech is one of the fastest growing industries in the UK which is now valued at $1tn. Investment in the UK tech industry grew 2.3x with £24.4bn raised by UK startups and scale-ups in 2021.
Hired data continues to show women who are paid less also expect lower salaries than their male counterparts – even if they have the same experience. Compared to ten North American cities, London has the largest wage gap with women being offered just £0.91 for every £1.00 offered to men for the same roles. The data shows that women are underestimating themselves by citing a preferred salary that is 5% less than what men applying for the same positions ask for on average.
Additional key findings from the report include:
- Women in London receive lower average salary offers compared with men, but there is progress. Women in London are offered a lower salary compared to men 62% of the time, but this is down from 66% in 2018.
- Women in London have a wider ‘expectation gap’ compared to men. Women cite a preferred salary that is 5% lower compared to men applying for the same positions. This shows a difference in expectations between men and women with women undervaluing their ability to earn a comparable salary to men.
- More than a third of positions invite men only to interview, but this is improving. Hired found a sizable decrease in the percentage of positions sending interview requests to only men. In 2018, 48% of positions were sent to only men, while in 2021, the data showed 38%. In 2021, women only received 17% of the interview requests.
- The wage gap persists for remote roles. There was a gender wage gap found among remote jobs and local jobs – when examining expectation of salaries and final salaries of roles, with remote gender wage gaps showing to be slightly wider than those of local jobs/roles. In other words, remote jobs had wider wage and expectation gaps versus local jobs.
The sixth annual report analyses wage and expectation gaps in salary data across gender, race, age and sexuality in the tech industry. The findings are based on Hired’s proprietary data from over 819,000 interview requests and job offers facilitated through Hired’s marketplace from over 3,900 participating companies and more than 120,000 jobseekers in the US, UK and Canada.
“It’s been an ever-shifting and evolving hiring landscape for employers and jobseekers over the last few years – from companies competing and sourcing for talent at a record pace, to the current state of macroeconomic uncertainty driving more measured hiring,” said Josh Brenner, CEO at Hired.
“This report shows that there is still work to be done in ensuring equitable hiring processes to narrow wage and expectation gaps, and companies must prioritise this effort. Post-Great Resignation, companies that are successful in identifying non-traditional talent, while also ensuring diversity and representation in their candidate pipelines, will be better positioned to drive their businesses forward in a time of increased volatility.”
Hired also found that companies using Diversity Goals, its new feature that helps companies prioritise outreach to underrepresented talent without removing relevant matching candidates, were able to more than double their pipeline of underrepresented candidates. Consequently, these companies using the new tool had both a lower wage and expectation gap compared to companies with the option turned off.
To access the data report, visit the State of Wage Inequality in the Tech Industry: Hired’s 2022 ImpactReport.