Silicon Valley Fails to Encourage Black Women as it Closes Wage Gaps
In Silicon Valley, the salary gap has narrowed for all minority groups except for black women. This is happening at a time when diversity and inclusion efforts are being announced by American companies.
According to a new report published by Hired, an online marketplace for technology jobs, the wage gap for African American women widened to $0.92 for every $1 a white man earns in 2021, up from $0.94 a year earlier.
Although the situation has improved for some groups, the wage gap between male and female tech workers of all races still exists, with Black and Hispanic women getting the lowest wages.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States of America, 26.2 per cent of people working in the computer and mathematical occupations in 2021 were women, and 8.5 per cent of those people were Black.
According to the findings of the survey published on Tuesday, just roughly one in five of the technology candidates who utilised the Hired platform in 2021 were identified as female.
As a result of the fact that more than one-third of the tech jobs primarily interviewed male candidates, the chance that a woman would receive an interview request was approximately thirteen per cent lower than it would have been for a male candidate.
They had a chance of being interviewed that was more than twenty per cent lower than for positions that were based in cities such as Seattle, Boston, and Denver.
The publication of this report comes at a time when employees at tech companies are calling for increased diversity, equity, and inclusion measures and when a robust job market provides workers with additional bargaining power.
Even while companies like Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Twitter Inc., and Snap Inc. have lately joined forces to improve the pipeline of underrepresented workers in Silicon Valley, it is still difficult to keep up with the advancements made in the technology industry.
“As employers navigate post-Great Resignation in 2022, it’s imperative to prioritise equitable hiring while strengthening diversity,” Hired Chief Executive Officer Josh Brenner wrote in the report. The use of diversity, equity and inclusion tools “creates more robust pipelines of candidates with new ideas to drive businesses forward.”
Some companies were successful in reducing or even eliminating the pay gap. In 2021, disparities between Asian women and men fell by 3 cents, bringing them closer to parity. Asian men now earn $1.05 for every dollar a white guy earns, despite already earning more on average than their white counterparts did as of last year.
Denver, which is followed by Seattle as the most equitable tech market in the US, saw the gender gap close by 5 cents to 0.98 cents over the past year. The disparity held steady at $0.95 and $0.93 in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York, respectively. The only big city where the disparity increased, from $0.93 to $0.94, was emerging Austin, Texas.
Over 3,900 participating employers and 120,000 job seekers from the US, UK, and Canada were included in the report's analysis of nearly 820,000 interview requests and job offers made possible via Hired's marketplace from January 2018 through December 2021.
Source: Bloomberg
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