Women in tech are asking for lower salaries than men

The male-dominated tech world has been put under serious scrutiny for its wage practices. And while many at the upper echelons of the industry insist there is no wage gap, it appears to be a persistent problem more widely.

After analyzing 100,000 interview requests and job offers over the last year, tech job marketplace Hired found that, on average, tech companies offer women 3% less than men for the same roles. Among the most interesting—and troubling—pieces of data is that men receive higher salaries 69% of the time than women for the same job titles at the same companies.

Some of that disparity could be attributable to women not setting their demands high enough. Because Hired’s marketplace lets job seekers specify the salaries they’re seeking, the report provides a glimpse into both expectations and final offers. In roles that are more male dominated, women often set their salary expectations lower than their male counterparts.

Reaffirming the findings from a 2014 Quartz article, Hired doesn’t notice much of a gender gap in salaries for women starting out in their careers in the tech industry. If anything, the final offers for female candidates with zero to two years of experience, at $95,000, is 7% higher than the $89,000 men receive from potential employers, according to Hired.

The key, it would seem, is setting the right expectations. Hired notes that across all levels of experience, women who ask for the same salaries as men for their roles “tend to get offers in line with what they’re asking,” which means they need to walk into negotiations knowing exactly what they’re worth.

Notably, Hired found that the earliest stage startups were the most equitable when it comes to setting salaries for male and female software engineers. The gender wage gap is lowest at bootstrapped and seed-stage companies, where the difference in salary for male and female developers is 4%. The biggest gap is at series A startups, where there’s an 8% difference in offers for men and women.