Gender disparity: Microsoft for men, Google for women

|By TAP Staff| Within the tech industry this year, several companies from Amazon to Facebook to Twitter have publicly released their workforce diversity demographics.

A Glassdoor report based on its salary and company ratings database on comparison of  compensation and employee satisfaction between men and women at a sample of 25 of the largest tech companies shows that at most of these companies, men report earning a higher base salary than women for the same role (it is important to note the average years of experience reported in each position). While several questions come up, two that bubble up for us include: What causes men to have a head start in these roles? And, if more women study technology and pursue careers in the industry, will we see the gap in compensation narrow?

Some highlights from this report show that there is a $6,000 discrepancy in median base salary when comparing women ($94,967, 3.2 years of experience) to men ($101,006, 3.3 years experience) in the software development engineer role at Microsoft. In some of these jobs, however, women report earning more than men. At Google, for example, women software engineers report earning an annual base salary of $117,740 (and report 3.5 years experience), more than $4,000 more than men ($113,548, with 3.9 years experience) in the same role.

Employee Satisfaction Revealed by Gender

Glassdoor also wanted to find out how men and women differ when it comes to employee satisfaction. At just four of the 25 tech companies (Texas Instruments, Epic Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Intel), women are more satisfied with their jobs and their company. Men are more satisfied at 15 of the 25 companies in this report (including Citrix and National Instruments), and there are  six companies where men and women report the same level of satisfaction with their job and company.

Further, we also found that among this sample of 25 tech companies women are slightly less satisfied on average than men across four key workplace factors: senior leadership, culture & values, career opportunities and work-life balance. Check out the data table below to see how men and women specifically differ for employee satisfaction at each of these companies: