Salary Survey Extra is a series of dispatches that give added insight into the findings of our annual Salary Survey. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

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Sometime around A.D. 60, the warrior queen Boudica led a bloody uprising against the Roman conquerors who had recently occupied the constituent realms of present-day England and Wales. The events that spurred Boudica's wrath occurred when imperial officials, upon the death of her husband, Prasutagus, ignored the dead ruler's wish for his kingdom to be divided between the Romans and his daughters.

In particular, the monstrous manner of the Romans' indifference galled Boudica and her proud people — imperial officials expressed their disdain of Prasutagus' will by having Boudica flogged and allowing her daughters to be raped. Probably only somewhat less bothersome, however, was the Romans' root assumption that mere women were not important enough to inherit their father's wealth or lead his people.

In 2022, women are treated considerably better than in the appallingly unenlightened annals of antiquity. There's still an idea hanging around, however, that it's OK for women to be treated differently than men, perhaps nowhere more so than in the modern workforce. It's still a relatively recent development that woman have been deemed to be on equal footing with men when it comes to hiring for most jobs.

More to the point, however, women are generally still paid less than men for comparable work done under comparable conditions. The persistent pay gap between men and women is as deeply embedded in the IT industry as anywhere else. Past Salary Surveys have shown, and our newest data confirms, that male workers are, at least monetarily, substantially more valued then their female counterparts. Men get higher IT salaries than women.

Among the 79.6 percent of U.S. survey respondents who are men and employed full-time, the average annual salary in 2021 was $112,830. For women employed full-time, who accounted for 17.4 percent of all U.S. responses, the comparable figure is $103,270. Among certified IT professionals in the United States then, full-time female workers on average earned roughly 9 percent less than their male counterparts.

(Not considered in these calculations are the 0.2 percent of U.S. respondents employed full-time who identify as either transgender male, transgender female, or gender variant/nonconforming. Also omitted: the 2.8 percent of U.S. respondents employed full-time who chose not to identify their gender.)

The income inequality is less stark outside the United States, where female certified IT professionals who are employed full-time earned, on average, a mere 3 percent less than men in 2021. The 84.3 percent of non-U.S. survey respondents who are men and employed full-time had an average annual salary of $70,750 last year, compared to a surprisingly strong $68,550 for the 11.6 percent of non-U.S. respondents who are women.

(Not considered in these calculations are the 1 percent of non-U.S. respondents employed full-time who identify as either transgender male, transgender female, or gender variant/nonconforming. Also omitted: the 3.1 percent of non-U.S. respondents employed full-time who chose not to identify their gender.)

We also looked at the gender income gap generationally. Are men and women unequally compensated across the generational spectrum? We divided workers into three groups by age, looking at the young (age 34 and younger), the middle-aged (between the ages of 35 and 54), and the pre-retirement crowd (age 55 and older). Here’s what we found:

ALL U.S. WORKERS

In the United States, there’s unequal pay for men and women across all three generation of workers, though the gap is notably larger among the middle segment of workers. Men earn about 12 percent more on average than women, both among workers 34 and younger and among workers 55 and older. The disparity is much smaller— about 2.5 percent — among workers between the ages of 35 and 54.

ALL NON-U.S. WORKERS

Interestingly, it's women who have the upper hand across all three generations of workers outside the United States. When we compared all of the men to all of the women, men had a slight edge. When non-U.S. certified IT professionals are segmented by age, however, women are doing slightly better than men both among workers between the ages of 35 and 54 and among workers 55 and older. Among the rising generation, workers age 34 and younger, women are outearning men by almost 20 percent.

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