Study of 120K tech job offers finds in 63% of cases, women received lower salary offers than men at same job in same firm, Latina and black women fare worst
According to a new study involving more than 120,000 job offers transacted on Hired, a jobs marketplace for tech workers …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 analysis of Hired marketplace offers is the opening data point in what becomes a multi-year series: the same marketplace later reports white workers asking $130K and receiving $136K while Hispanic and black workers ask $124K, and by 2022 finds female African American tech workers earning $0.92 per white male dollar — down from $0.94 two years earlier despite D&I initiatives.
First-order effects
- Women interviewing through Hired for identical roles at identical firms receive lower offers in roughly two-thirds of cases, with Latina and Black candidates getting the lowest numbers — meaning the penalty lands at the offer stage, before negotiation even begins.
Second-order effects
- The 2018 follow-up shows the gap feeding back into behavior: underpaid groups anchor their own salary asks lower ($124K vs. $130K), so each discounted offer depresses the next round of negotiations.
Third-order effects
- Because the pattern recurs across 2017, 2019 and 2022 measurements — including same-role pay comparisons showing Latinx and black women 9–11% behind white men — employer-side D&I programs alone are not closing it, pointing toward structural fixes like standardized offer bands and pay audits rather than hiring pledges.
The trend: Tech's gender and racial pay gap is proving durable across a decade of marketplace data, shifting the debate from whether bias exists to whether voluntary D&I initiatives can ever close it.