Gender Bias in NYC Salaries

Beatbeat recently released an article listing the 20 most hirable yet already employed developers and designers in the NYC area. Given the scarcity of tech talent on today’s market, these “poachable” employees were listed alongside a Ballpark Poachability Number (B.P.N.) that, as Foster Kamer explained, is “an index compiled from salaries known, either of The Poachables’ or those around them, and then from the kind of offer that could get them to budge; not what they’re paid, it’s what they could get paid. It’s basically a glorified, informed guesstimate.“

The intriguing part of the story is how much lower the “suggested retail” asking salaries are for women compared to men, even for jobs with the same titles and technical requirements.

I’ve compiled a chart of B.P.N. salary ranges by gender, excluding everyone asking for over $400K/yr (none of whom were women). The women listed have opening salaries that are roughly 40% less than the men. The average salary for the men is ~$170K, while women are listed at ~100K.

Although much of the science behind the B.P.N. is anecdotal, it is shocking to see such a wide salary gap for highly educated and hotly contested candidates, many of whom were asked directly what they would like to be paid. Did the women in the article report their current salaries when asked while the men offered inflated “desired” compensation? Is there an inherent skew in publicly available salary sites like Glassdoor? Would similar studies in other cities yield the same result?

For anyone who has yet to give it a read, I would suggest taking a look at Linda Babcock’s Women Don’t Ask to get a better understanding of the issues surrounding this topic.