Women are paid less than men. This discrimination manifests across numerous professions, even when factors like experience and education are taken into account. However, a new study by Glassdoor confirms what many in San Francisco may have long suspected — the position of computer programmer has the highest gender pay gap of any occupation in the country.
The study, published yesterday, is titled "Demystifying the Gender Pay Gap," and its authors note that "[today], the gender pay gap remains around 75-80 cents per dollar on average, and hasn’t budged in a decade."
That number is an average across professions, however, and things get decidedly worse when a closer look is taken at programming.
"The occupation with the highest gender pay gap was computer programmer, with a gap of 28.3 percent," the study finds. "This amounts to women earning on average 72 cents per dollar earned by men, after controlling for all differences between jobs, companies and workers—a gap that is roughly five times larger than the U.S. average 'adjusted' gender pay gap of 5.4 percent."
Seventy-two cents on the dollar.
Interestingly, this wage discrimination is not as pronounced in the tech industry as a whole. Don't get us wrong, it still exits in tech, however "the overall information technology (or 'tech') industry is close to the U.S. average and falls in the middle of the pack among industries." It appears the worst of the worst is specifically reserved for programming.
And while this report might elicit a "no duh" response from some, seeing the numbers laid bare is still pretty shocking. Fingers crossed someone in tech can figure out a way to disrupt the pay gap, but we're not holding our breath.
Related: 60% Of Women In Tech Are Sexually Harassed (And More Numbers To Make You Throw Up)