It’s a continuing disgrace that women workers rarely get paid the same as their male counterparts — something that’s as true of IT as any other sector. What strategies can female engineers and developers use to ensure they are paid what they deserve?
Network engineer picture from Shutterstock
That topic was one of several discussed during the Women In Flight panel which preceded Twitter’s TwitterFlight mobile development conference in San Francisco this week. During the panel, six prominent female engineers and coders touched on a wide range of issues relating to women participating in the professional tech community.
It’s a topic that’s rarely far from the headlines, evident in the recent discussion over Facebook and Apple offering to freeze eggs for female employees and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s ill-considered comments that equality was a matter of “karma” rather than something that needed to be addressed.
Consultant Patty McCord, who has previously worked for Netflix, Seagate, Borland and numerous other tech companies over a 30-year career, highlighted that information is the ultimate weapon when you’re seeking a raise.
“For everyone, data is your friend,” McCord said, adding that accepting interviews from recruiters was a good strategy to identify your current worth. “Before you say ‘no thanks’, be sure you say ‘how much?’ A great way to find out your market value is to interview. If somebody calls you with an interesting proposition, be sure to follow it up. You want to know what your market value is as you move forward in your career.”
There are two key points when you can negotiate a better salary, McCord noted: when you accept a new role and when annual compensation reviews come around. “You want to be prepared way before the process starts. Be able to say: I’ve been doing some research on what like me are paid. If you stay underpaid as a woman for 10 years, you can’t catch up. Your career is your career: companies don’t owe you a career. You’ve got to manage it.”
Having said that, the actual process of asking can still seem challenging. “Stepping into the room and asking for something you’re not even sure you deserve is daunting,” said Tracy Chou, lead software engineer at Pinterest. Her strategy? “A lot of confidence, a little bit of grace and a little bit of greed.”
“There are unfortunately fewer women in leadership positions who stay in core engineering,” said Nandini Ramani, vice president of engineering for Twitter and a veteran of Oracle and Sun. There have been so many times where I’ve thought maybe it would be easier if I switched [to a marketing or business development role]. I won’t always be the only woman at the table. The reality is the number of women who make it to CEOs from an engineering track are very few, if any.
“People just get tired of fighting it,” McCord agreed. “People get lonely. It is the ‘only woman in the room’ syndrome. I’ve done this for 30 years and I’ve seen it over and over again. Often it comes down to ‘I’m going to promote someone like me’. The decision makes are men and they promote men.”
“As you get higher in the engineering organisation, to move forward, the top people in core engineering have the most brilliant minds and the higher up you get the harder it is to move,” said . Sara Haider, lead Android engineer for Secret. “You have to have close relationships with the people around you and above you.”
Inequality isn’t going to disappear any time soon. “Even beyond not getting promoted, the median experience of being a woman in tech in engineering is much worse than being a man,” Chou noted.
It’s a challenging career path, but rarity can sometimes pay off. “The supply of women engineers is incredibly low, and demand is incredibly high,” said Jana Messerschmidt, vice president of Twitter’s platform team. “So use that leverage when you’re negotiating your salary.”
The ultimate rule for progress is a simple one, as McCord explained: “Work with really smart people on stuff that really matters and deliver great shit on time.” Doing that regardless of gender will improve the world for everyone. “Our business will be better if more women are involved. That’s just it.”
Disclosure: Angus Kidman travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Twitter.
Comments
12 responses to “How To Get A Raise: The Female IT Engineer Perspective”
You you people stop posting the fallacy that women get paid less then their male counter parts without checking the facts, When more men work in an industry then women, the average male wage is higher, because, more men are working higher paying jobs then women.
That doesn’t make any sense, by that logic more men are also working lower paying jobs than women.
Correct.
Yeah this is exactly why they use averages
My wife is an engineer – so I have some vested interest in this topic. I’m also in the industry.
I agree that some women are paid lower then men and some men are paid lower than women. I also recognise that some women are too passive – and let me assure you that an organisation will overlook -anyone of any gender- who is passive, like my very own dearest wife. This is a FACT that people (including dear Angus) overlook – probably because it’s politically correct and partly because it gets more clicks.
This article is good in that it promotes the issue -and- offers suggestions. This article is bad in that it makes weak excuses and uses the boogey man argument.
FACT: On one project I was a leader on, we had over 100 staff. Almost every MALE recognised that one particular FEMALE was about the best engineer on the project (and that’s an -impressive- feat). If the “all men are bastards/biggots/suppressors”, this would not have happened. However, I don’t ever recall one MALE telling this FEMALE how good they saw her. She was the “go to” person, so it wasn’t hard to guess.
I also recall another project where we had a female engineer who was the WORST engineer i’ve ever seen. Everyone was so touchy feely that she never got the feedback she needed. Let’s just say that she didn’t know how to use a counter to count (which is computing 101 if you ask me).
So … my conclusion from a lot of experience? Many women are too passive in the workplace for their own good. Society and the work place is far too politically correct, and some people will just be nasty to others. Some women are likely to feel intimidated by sheer numbers (my wife NOT included in that – she prefers the “no bull**** that you get working with guys” … one of her favourite quotes).
If I were to offer one tip, it would be “don’t make weak excuses”. I think it undermines the people that are truly great – and I know quite a few women who are truly great without the political correct horsesh**.
yes thats correct, if there are 10 people in the industry and 9 of them are men, and 8 men and 1 woman get paid the same but the 10th man get paid double, then yes women are paid less* then men in the industry
*on average based on standard average formulation, not taking into account gender distributuion, or any other factors.
But that’s not how the studies usually average the statistics. They average across positions rather than the industry as a whole (e.g. comparing software developer to software developer, not software developer to C.E.O). The industry average they talk about is a collation of the position-specific averages.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-gap_b_2073804.html
Obfuscating the problem with flawed logic doesn’t make it go away.
Look at link above.
I’m not sure if I’ve just been lucky or if there’s something I’m doing subconsciously, but I’ve never found my career affected by gender-based discrimination (so far anyway). Sure, I’ve had people imply that I only got top grades at university because I’m female (or worse that I only got them because “I was sleeping with the professor/lecturer/tutor”), or that I only got the highly-contested position that I did because of my gender, but thankfully those people have never been the ones in power. My supervisors/managers have all so far have treated me the same as my fellow male software developers, and I certainly don’t feel that I’m different to them. Maybe that would change if I ever decided I wanted to take time off to have children, I really don’t know. I like to think that it wouldn’t make a difference, and I’m looking forward to the day that someone’s gender is not a talking point in any industry (female-dominated industries included).
I actually clicked on this article because of the feature image used to promote the article. What an awful cliche. If we’re going to have reasonably intelligent or nuanced commentary on the topic, can we do away with the terrible stock imagery.
Care to explain why you think the stock image is terrible?
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