The Backlash! - January 1998

Wage discrimination
in Information Systems

The gap is smaller than the media would have us believe.

by a "privileged" white man

With few exceptions, the media uncritically reports, repeats and promotes the pop feminist refrain of wage discrimination. Certainly, there is ample evidence of a wage gap between women and men in many professions, and to the simple minded torch and pitchfork crowd, no further proof of discrimination against women is needed. The male is a monster, he is guilty, hunt him down and burn him up. But the truth is our friend, and he has more to say on the subject in this article by an Information Systems manager.
One of my favorite web sites is Anchordesk. Recently, however, they ran an article that was remarkable less for its contribution to clarity than to perpetuating a sexist stereotype:

"Salary inequities based on gender are most pronounced in the software engineer category. Male engineers on average earn $10,000 more a year than their female counterparts. (National average for software engineers is $57,668 annually.)" - Salary Zone Uncovers Myth/Reality of IT (Information Technology) Wages by Annette Hamilton, Executive Producer, ZDNet AnchorDesk.

This reminds me of the old saying, "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics!" Statistics are only useful so long as the reader clearly understands the bias built into the statistics. In this case, there are plenty, and as a male IT professional married to an Internal Medicine doctor who makes a good bit more money than I do, it has been my experience that, Hamilton's implications of sex discrimination notwithstanding, IS (Information Systems) is probably one of the most gender blind professions available.

So why such an apparently big difference between men's and women's salaries, with men making the most money? Four main reasons:

  1. Education - only during the past couple decades have the number of women pursuing degrees in technical fields begun to match that of men. It makes sense that people with higher education will get paid more.

    My wife's medical school class, for example, was the first in her school's history in which women outnumbered men, a trend that is sure to continue. She earned the Internal Medicine achievement award at her graduation, and the highest grade point in the class (4.0) was earned by a woman. Despite this, even though the gap is closing, it will be some time before women doctors as a group make as much money as male doctors because, as a group, they still lack experience and seniority.

  2. Experience - in any given profession, those who have more experience commonly earn more. As a group, women have less experience in the IS profession than men, and until they do it just makes sense that men as a group will be paid more.

  3. Seniority - people who have been on the job longer generally make more than people who have just been hired. In the IS profession, however, it is often just the opposite and people who have just started will get paid as much or more than people who have more seniority. This is why so many IS professionals switch jobs every two to three years. As women tend to be both more security oriented and risk adverse than men, they are more likely to stay with one job and forego the pay increase opportunities that men are willing to pursue.

  4. Passing up promotion opportunities - many women choose the IS profession for life-style reasons and intentionally pass up opportunities that would lead to additional responsibility, position, and pay. They do this for a very good reason. They want to spend more time with their families or just are happy with what they are doing and don't want the promotion. It should be obvious why people who pass up promotion opportunities end up making less.

Women as a group have yet to achieve as much education or experience as men, while men as a group are more likely to have more seniority in the IS field and are more willing to accept the risks involved in changing jobs. All factors that contribute to the so-called "salary inequities."

Failing to take them into account causes the differential to appear larger than it really is for situations in which, ceteris parabis (all other things being held equal), all things but gender are the same. Hence, Hamilton's comparison overstates the extent to which sex discrimination may explain the earnings differential, something the national media is wont to do.

As a strong proponent of equal pay for equal education, experience, seniority, and work, I would be willing to bet male nurses, on average, earn less than female nurses. Again, however, all things held equal, we would probably find the differences are much smaller than they initially appear.

Clarifying the issue

According to a (female) Economics professor at the University of Memphis who studies men/women's salary issues, once the salary discrepancies are adjusted for the above factors, the differences are much smaller than the national media would like us to believe. Exaggeration only promulgates the impression most men still do not see women as equals, and that we just want to hold them down. At best, that is inaccurate.

It would be very refreshing if, rather than running with the media mob, Anchordesk presented future salary articles in the light of how much progress women in IS are making compared to past years and other industries. These women do, after all, deserve recognition for their accomplishments.

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