Research: white and Asian women paid 3% less than white and Asian men in same tech jobs last year; Latinx and black women paid 9% and 11% less than white men
Data reveals the wage gap … Erin Carson / CNET : Equal Pay Day: Women in tech are still making less than men Tweets: Rani Molla / @ranimolla : The gender wage gap is smaller in tech, but it will hurt the economy more http://www.recode.net/... http://twitter.com/... @projectinclude : Happy Equal Pay Day. April 2 is meant to symbolize how much longer a woman would have to work into the new year to make the same as a man did last year http://www.recode.net/... @db : #LGBTQ+ men and women are earning less than their non-LGBTQ+ counterparts. Men: 4% less, Women: 2% less. #LGBT+ women *were* making 1% more last year, but its fallen 3%. http://hired.com/... http://twitter.com/... @recode : Today is #EqualPayDay. The bad news: Women on the whole in tech make less than men.The relatively good news: The gap in pay between women and men in tech has decreased a little bit: http://www.recode.net/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands on Equal Pay Day with two years of accumulating evidence behind it. A study of 120K tech job offers had already shown women receiving lower offers than men for the same role at the same firm in 63% of cases, with Latina and black women faring worst; this new dataset sharpens that picture into same-job comparisons, separating a narrow 3% gap for white and Asian women from 9-11% gaps for Latinx and black women against white men.
The timing matters because it complicates the corporate self-audit narrative: weeks earlier, Google reported its own analysis found it was underpaying more men than women among engineers and paid out $9.7M in adjustments to over 10K Googlers. Same-job parity at big firms can coexist with the distribution problem Twitter disclosed — equal salaries but women earning only ~37% of total payroll — which is where this research points.
First-order effects
- Employers running pay-equity audits now have a benchmark showing same-job gaps vary sharply by race and gender — 3% versus 9-11% — meaning a single company-wide adjustment number like Google's can mask who is actually underpaid.
- The LGBTQ+ findings cut both ways: men earn 4% less and women 2% less than non-LGBTQ+ counterparts, erasing the prior-year pattern where LGBTQ+ women held a 1% advantage — a reversal D&I teams tracking year-over-year must explain.
Second-order effects
- Companies that publish diversity reports face pressure to add pay distribution data, not just headcount: Twitter's equal-salary claim sits awkwardly next to its ~37% payroll share, and Intel's disclosure that fewer than 10% of black employees reach its top pay tier shows what granular reporting exposes.
- Recruiting platforms and compensation-data vendors gain demand for intersectional benchmarks, since firms defending against audit or litigation risk need race-by-gender comparisons rather than blended gender averages.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry's pay-equity fight shifts from 'same job, same pay' — largely achieved at large firms per these audits — to representation within senior and top-tier roles, where the compounding gaps actually live.
- Voluntary disclosures like Intel's and Twitter's create a template regulators and plaintiffs can cite, pushing pay transparency from annual PR reports toward standardized, auditable reporting across the sector.
The trend: Tech pay-equity measurement is moving from blended gender averages toward intersectional race-and-gender analysis, and from salary parity toward who captures total payroll and top-tier pay.