Interesting data, BUT... "Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team." - this is gender discrimination and it is illegal.

How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/meetups/conferences, involving your leadership with mentoring at and recruiting from places like the Hackbright Academy, etc. etc.

It costs money, it costs time, hell, it takes a long time to produce results, but you know what - it's worth it! They are an outlier, but I do like Etsy's approach (and results) to gender diversity - http://firstround.com/review/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-F....

>Education shrank the results to single digits for each occupation, gender and work experience, so I decided to remove it from the final dataset.

First of all you could have used buckets. Secondly, it doesn't seem like you have enough data judging from your charts.

Dice did a study and found that

>when you control for education, level of experience and parallel job titles, says Dice, men and women earn the same amounts.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/03/20/women-are-...

> At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team

I hope you get sued

> At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team

I stopped reading after this part!

Generally as a startup, many applicants come through current employees, friends, investors, etc. This generally encourages the cycle of the same people getting the same jobs. Don't rely on your website to widen the diversity of your funnel, even if your jobs list is current...most startups I know are not great about keeping this current anyway.

A few (relatively easy) ideas:

1. Join a few "______ in tech" email lists, and if you don't feel comfortable joining the list or it is not allowed, at least email the moderator and ask if they take job postings.

2. Send someone from your company to attend to a "____ in tech" meetup. There are a lot and they happen often. Ask people at these meetups where they get their information, what email lists they are on, etc. Then, act.

3. Interns. People have mixed thoughts on interns, fine, but the "lack of experience" trope happens because it's really hard to get that first chance. Take a chance on someone in a lower-risk way.

4. Host some kind of public-facing community event one or two times per year. Advertise it on your website and your twitter. Generally as a woman I am more comfortable attending something like this rather than cold-emailing a company for a position that I am not even sure they are hiring for. See: "Code as Craft" at Etsy. Tech-centric topic, inclusive and public-facing way to see the office, meet employees etc.

I thought this was an interesting article and then I read the comments. Oh dear, a bunch of white guys kvetching and clutching their...pearls. Your deprivation moves me. Really. Anyway I had a point to make, as a software engineer for 30 years and a woman. (The proportion of women in the field has fallen by half since I started my career.) For my last job I went with a high end recruiting agency and the recruiter got me to raise my salary request by 25K. I ended up getting 10K above her suggestion. It was interesting to see that indeed I was undervaluing myself. In this I find that I was pretty typical of female engineers. I'm glad I took the recruiter's advice. By the way my salary seems to be exactly in line with the salary of men with my experience, from these charts.

> Born white and male in today’s world I won the lottery without having a clue.

Here we go. (actually I stopped reading).

Nice work!

How many data points per graph? Really just 1 median salary a year (20x2 data points and 1k^2 pixels :)? I would have preferred just points with straight lines over the interpolated wavy line that looks fibbed. Why not more points? Why not a heat map/2d histogram instead of medians? And why not have the same axis on all the graphs?

Looks pretty compelling based on the graphs at the bottom. Seems like OP could lead with those or at least make a percentage right up at the top for those of us that need a TLDR instead of a play by play.

> At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team

Most of us can agree that this is a bad decision, but I've always wondered how people can end up with such tunnel vision. Men in IT has always been overrepresented, so it's not surprising that the majority of teams are mostly men. But what I wonder is why this person thinks that hiring women only will change this trend? It is in fact gender discrimination, but I believe that inspiring women to work in the IT field is the key to solve the problem. I don't think anyone wants special treatment due to their gender, but rather evaluated by their skills and experiences.

Completely tangent, but I'm surprised ops and hardware are so low.

Any idea where I can find LGBTQ wage gap too. Also, now that female glass ceiling is broken, which glass ceiling is next? L,G,B,T or Q?

Would be helpful to see some histograms. The patterns of the data seem oddly suspect to me (sinusoidal - with things like Operations in 5 year earning more than ops at 7.4ish year). Maybe I am missing something but am assuming this is just because of sample size. It seems extreme for things like Operations and Hardware Engineer though.

Now all men who were rejected can easily sue you. Solid move bro.

Data collection: A+

Analysis: needs improvement.

From the article:

> Based on the data, women are definitely undervaluing themselves in comparison to men. The gap starts around $10k/year for the first year and grows to a staggering $30k/year after 10 years of working epxeriences. [sic]

An alternative interpretation is that women are behaving entirely logically with the knowledge that their employability is maximized if they set their desired salaries lower than men with equivalent experience. Efficient markets are a thing.

I'm not saying that's my interpretation of the data, I'm just cautioning against jumping to conclusions when that conclusion is implicitly blaming the victims. It's a really great analysis and the dataset could set up a great follow-on study of causation.

I realize you're going to get a lot of controversy on something like this but this is a great read. First and foremost, excellent work with the data gathering. Now I want to tinker with TensorFlow.

I think you drew the generally correct conclusion from this:

"But I hope that it will encourage at least some women to think more about their value for an employer and next time will negotiate a better deal for themselves."

My only problem with the conclusion is that statements like this make the assumption that women are not already thinking about their value. My family owns a business that employees almost entirely women with graduate degrees. All very sharp and want to do well in their careers but having diverse interpretations of what doing well actually means to them. Your data is probably better than any I've seen to point that out since it is based on DESIRED salaries.

Some want to advance their careers primarily and while others significantly value flexibility for sake of their families. Men tend to be more singular in focus. We want to advance our careers for sake of ourselves AND our families.

The goals naturally align with a desire to advance in large part to make it easier for our wives to take a pay cut to have more time for the kids. While there are plenty of stay at home dads and role reversals today, the norm is very much the opposite...and it's going to stay that way not because of social acceptance but because of biology...unless of course men start carrying babies for 9 months, going through childbirth, recovering from childbirth, breastfeeding and everything that involves (waking up and night, pumping, freezing milk) and the bond that naturally comes from all of that. Before repeating the process for additional children.

A lot of that stuff is hardwired. I see my wife doing all of that and realize there's only so much I can do to help...but I can try to make more money to make life a little easier.

There are a WHOLE lot of women who decide they want to stop having to work for a while after they've had kids, at least for the early years but then discover that they can't afford too. Between student loans, potentially going overboard on a mortgage from two incomes, etc NOT having a job with the new expense of a child becomes almost unimaginable to handle. There's even a book about it called The Two Income Trap.

All that's to say, don't make the mistake of thinking that people are undervaluing themselves because you don't agree with what they're asking for. You never know what they really want.

> implying being born in Slovakia is winning some sort of lottery

"graphs generated for each occupation, representing a median (not an average!)"

But the y-axis is labeled average salary!

>If you are a female engineer living in the Bay Area, we’d love to meet you.

Totally not sexism folks. Equality at its best!