In Silicon Valley, Men 69 Percent More Likely To Receive Higher Salary Offer

SAN FRANCISCO  (CBS SF) -- Women in Silicon Valley are being offered -- and paid -- less than men for the same jobs. Even in 2016.

Microsoft and Facebook recently declared they had closed their gender pay gaps but, according to a report released by San Francisco-based career marketplace Hired, tech companies are still underpaying women in comparison to men.

Across California, women are making about 84 percent the salary of men, according to U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, and while Silicon Valley fares better, there remains a significant salary difference between men and women.

Dr. Jessica Kirkpatrick, Hired's lead product data scientist, released a report in honor of Equal Pay Day 2016 based on the company's data which includes salary information from more than 100,000 interview requests and job offers over the past year with more than 3,000 companies and 15,000 job seekers, all facilitated through Hired.

"Hired has unprecedented visibility into the salaries that men and women ask for and what companies, in turn, offer them," Hired states in the report.

What Hired found was largely disappointing.

"Companies offered women 3 percent less than men for the same roles, with some companies offering as low as 30% less," according to Hired.

Not only were women offered less, but they received less.

Hired's data spans only technology, sales and marketing roles, but it revealed that 69 percent of the time, men received higher salary offers than women for the same job title, at the same company.

What the data doesn't explain is whether the pay gap was the result of unconscious gender bias during the hiring process or a result of women not demanding as much as their competition. Or something else altogether.

However, the report did reveal that smaller startups tended to have half the gender wage gap than larger corporations when it came to software engineers. For early stage startups, male engineers received about 4 percent more than their female counterparts, while at major corporations the gap was far greater, with men receiving 7 percent larger salaries than women.

Interestingly enough, the largest wage gap was found with companies that had received Series A funding from investors. At those companies, on average, male software engineers received 8 percent bigger salaries than their female counterparts.

Unfortunately, Hired's date showed that women using their platform to negotiate salaries, on average,  asked for $14,000 per year less than men.

As Hired analyzed their data, they did discover something encouraging: entry-level female candidates negotiating on Hired were not only asking for 2 percent more in salary than men, but they were actually receiving 7 percent more than men.

The data couldn't account for the cause of that anomaly, but the author of the report hypothesizes that it may be the result of a younger generation that sees beyond gender.

By Hannah Albarazi - Follow her on Twitter: @hannahalbarazi.

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• Silicon Valley