In honor of Equal Pay Day, PayScale will do its first ever Reddit AMA today, April 14, 2015 at 10:00 a.m. PST. Senior Director of Editorial and Marketing Lydia Frank and Managing Editor Aubrey Bach will answer all of your questions about how women in tech can negotiate the salary they deserve.
(Photo: Lydia Frank and Aubrey Bach/PayScale)
Women who work for tech companies face unique challenges. For starters, there aren’t enough of them – although women make up 47 percent of the workforce, only 18 percent of women earn degrees in computer science, according to the National Girls Collaborative Project.
Women hold about a quarter of tech jobs, and the largest and most coveted employers often post abysmal stats for female engineers and computer scientists. For example, at Facebook, women hold 47 percent of non-technology jobs, and only 15 percent of engineering and computer science jobs.
Furthermore, women appear to be leaving the technology sector in droves, thanks to issues like lack of maternity leave and social bias against mothers, culturally condoned sexism, and outright sexual harassment.
But even women in tech who love their jobs and their employers can find it hard to advocate for themselves when it comes to salary. Women are more likely to report feeling uncomfortable negotiating salary, and also more likely to be perceived negatively when they do. Salary negotiation, for anyone, is a tricky subject, requiring the negotiator to walk a fine line between assertiveness and aggression, and necessitating plenty of research ahead of time.
Join PayScale today, Tuesday, April 14, at 10 a.m. PST to learn how to get the salary you deserve. Participating is easy. At the designated time, log into Reddit, go to the AMA subreddit and look for the thread titled We are data geeks from PayScale.com who love to talk salary negotiation. We’re also two women working in the tech industry … AMA. We hope to see you there!
Tell Us What You Think
Are you afraid to negotiate salary? We want to hear from you! Leave a comment or join the discussion on Twitter.
Frank, your comments are so full of typos and false generalizations, I have to assume that you fall into the category of “a target for reduction in the work force.” Surely some hardworking, dedicated woman with a graduate degree will replace you in due time. A man who states “women are not treated any different in coding roles vs other fields” does not know how rampant sexism is overall, especially in traditionally male-dominated fields, but that is not surprising, because… Read more »
RE bias against mothers, culturally condoned sexism, and outright sexual harassment. Tech us a thankless grind OT to get it done and priority on project schedule vs. personal schedule is the norm. That is why THE US and Asia dominate vs FRANCE If your gender identity doesn’t include a work ethic that puts a priority on the company’s latest code release then maybe you are correct. But most school teachers and any most peep over 45 agree social interaction and… Read more »
Development is a grind and OT and healthy discord is normal
Thin skinned and pacive people will not be successful.
Productivity and short learning curve outtweighs everything.
Women are not treated any different in coding roles vs other fields, any resource that us not technically the best regardless of body odor or quirks is a target for reduction in work force.