Hired data: on average, white tech workers ask for $130K salary, receive $136K offer; Hispanic and black workers ask for $124K, receive ~$130K offer
Megan Rose Dickey / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Hired's marketplace data lands in a well-documented arc: a study of 120K tech job offers had already found women receiving lower offers than men for the same role at the same firm in 63% of cases, and the EEOC had flagged the industry for underutilizing its diverse talent pool back in 2016.
What this dataset adds is the negotiation stage itself — Hispanic and Black candidates enter the market asking about $6K less than white candidates, and offers track those asks rather than correcting them. Later work confirmed the pattern compounds: Recode's 2019 analysis showed Latinx and black women paid 9% and 11% less than white men in identical roles.
First-order effects
- Hispanic and Black candidates on Hired are anchoring roughly $6K below white candidates ($124K vs $130K asks) and receiving offers near their asks — meaning the negotiation itself transmits the gap rather than closing it.
Second-order effects
- Employers relying on candidate-stated expectations inherit the gap into their own payrolls, which pressures companies with public D&I commitments — the same ones later shown by Hired's 2021 data to still be paying female African American workers $0.92 per white male dollar — to audit offer-setting practices, not just hiring funnels.
Third-order effects
- If ask-anchored offers persist across platforms and years, pay-equity scrutiny shifts from who gets hired to how offers are constructed, pushing toward standardized bands and salary-history bans as the industry's default compensation mechanics.
The trend: Tech's pay gap is proving durable across a decade of datasets — from offer studies to marketplace asks — persisting through successive waves of D&I initiatives.