Salary Survey Extra: IT salaries by age and gender
Posted on
April 9, 2016
by

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 These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.

How do age and gender correspond to IT salary?

It's been said that age is just a number. Salary, likewise, is just a number. Do these two numbers have anything to do with each other? Generally speaking, it's probably safe to say that there's a basic correlation. The older you are, the longer you have worked. The longer you have worked, the more experience and knowledge you have gained. The more experience and knowledge you have gained, the more valuable you are to your employer.

Naturally, the more valuable you are to your employer, the higher your compensation.

There are flaws in this line of reasoning, to be sure. Generalizations, by their nature, don't neatly categorize every individual. Most observers would likely agree, however, that the broader idea is sound. If you work a long time, then you'll end up making more toward the end of your career than you did at the beginning. And in a field like IT, where education tends to be ongoing, seasoned workers are perhaps even more valuable than they are in other professions.

Since we're dealing in generalizations today, another popular one is that men, for the most part, are better compensated than women. This tends to be true both in terms of the global workplace as a whole, and at the level of similarly skilled workers of different genders who perform similar job functions. Or is IT, perched on the leading edge of human knowledge and innovation, a little less beholden to the male-slanted inertia of human history?

A couple of weeks ago, we looked at how salary corresponds to level of employment. Today, as discussed above, we plugged some different variables into the trove of data from the annual Salary Survey. Here's what came back:

AVERAGE ANNUAL SALARY INDEXED BY AGE & GENDER

UNITED STATES ALL OTHER COUNTRIES
Men Women Men Women
AGE AGE
18 to 34 $82,880 $90,450 18 to 34 $34,290 $28,250
35 to 44 $112,430 $106,980 35 to 44 $59,730 $64,810
45 to 54 $121,940 $115,420 45 to 54 $77,501 $76,670
55 to 74 $119,020 $109,820 55 to 74 $83,872 $89,840

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WAKE UP HUNGRY  If breakfast is the most important meal of the day, then couldn't we all benefit from some hard data about what to eat before heading the office in the morning? That's precisely what the annual Salary Survey is for, right? OK, probably not exactly. And we didn't actually ask about nutrition when we raised the subject of breakfast in the survey's Not So Serious section.

If you have trouble making up your mind about what to eat each morning before work, however,  then you're actually in good company. Because so does everyone else, apparently. (OK a large chunk of "everyone else.") We asked survey respondents to name their favorite breakfast food, and more than one-fifth of them didn't have the brass to actually make a decision, instead taking the weak-willed, namby-pamby "I'll have some of everything" way out.

Here's the full rundown:

How do age and gender correspond to IT salary?

All of the above — 22.3 percent
Eggs — 17.9 percent
Coffee — 14.1 percent
Breakfast cereal with milk — 11.7 percent
Bacon — 8.6 percent
Oatmeal — 5.9 percent
Toast and juice — 5.2 percent
I never eat breakfast. — 4.1 percent
A piece of fruit — 3 percent
Pancakes — 2.6 percent
Tea and crumpets — 2.3 percent
Sausage — 1.2 percent
Waffles — 1.1 percent

Question as it appeared on the survey: The one true breakfast food is ...

About the Author

Certification Magazine was launched in 1999 and remained in print until mid-2008. Publication was restarted on a quarterly basis in February 2014. Subscribe to CertMag here.

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