Salary By Gender in UCD: Glass Ceiling? Other?

by Paul Sherman on April 26, 2006 · 3 comments

Since my post about the UPA 2005 Salary Survey, which referenced WebWord’s post about the survey, John Rhodes pointed out the gender disparity in pay.

It’s true, we did see a difference.

The data showed that women earned less on average than men. Men’s mean salary was $82,882 (median=$80,000), and women’s was $74,316 (median=$72,000).

This brings up some questions. Off the top of my head, I think the most crucial ones are:

Is this disparity greater than, less than, or equal to the pay disparity in other professional fields?
Are there differences in males’ and females’ experience or education level that might explain some of the pay disparity?

Some of the commenters at WebWord’s article raised these issues as well. (Pity party: How come I don’t get any blog comments? Sniff.)

I’m planning to revisit the data and explore this issue. More when I’ve run further analyses.

Tagged as: Meta, Professional

http://crocolyle.blogspot.com Lyle

You don’t get any comments for the same reason that I don’t: you don’t post often enough. :-)

I’d also like to point out that you don’t have any way to comment on a post from your home page…but I don’t have time to do a full heuristic eval. Maybe you could find a good, cheap usability practitioner to do a quick blog usability review for you. Know anyone good & cheap?

:-)
http://disambiguity.com leisa.reichelt

excellent. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with Paul :)
http://www.investorgeeks.com Jason Coleman

I think one of the troubles you will run into analyzing this data is that the disparity in older, more experienced, workers will be larger since those people have been working through the last 10 years or so when prejudices were worse. They would have received raises and promotions based on the climate of years passed. If you give Bill and Sue both a 25% raise this year, you’d still be favoring Bill if his base salary was higher than Sue’s. So it is difficult to tell what data on older workers says about current prejudices.

So you’ll be tempted to look at data of younger people. But this data is skewed too because disparities in salaries have historically (even when we were more prejudiced) been lower in younger people. This is because younger people typically have jobs that require less education and experience and thus level the playing field (since women have typically been trained and educated less in the past too).

All I can say is good luck.