The gender and race wage gap is narrowing, but access to opportunity and discrepancies in salaries persist for underrepresented tech talent

Hired, an AI-driven marketplace matching tech and sales talent with top companies, today released its annual State of Wage Inequality in the Tech Industry: Hired’s 2022 Impact Report. The wage gap – the difference in salaries between two defined demographic groups – across gender and race is narrowing, but still prevalent. Black women continue to see the widest gap among the demographics analysed.

Every year, Hired’s Impact Report finds there is a strong link between the wage gap and the salary expectations of underrepresented candidates. Hired data continues to show groups who are paid less also expect lower salaries than their white male counterparts – even if they have the same experience.

Race and gender combined are the strongest drivers of the expectation gap – with Hispanic women and Black women only expecting $0.91 to every $1 salary of their white male counterparts. Hispanic and Asian candidates reported a 1.5% and 1.0% percentage expectation gap improvement, respectively, but Hispanic and Asian women showed a wider expectation gap than their male counterparts. In addition, Black candidates showed a slight widening of 0.1% in the wage expectation gap – the only increase in expectation gap across candidates in 2021.

Additional key findings from the report include:

  • There are signs of progress in the gender opportunity gap. Hired found a sizable decrease in the percentage of positions sending interview requests to only men. In 2020, 42.4% of positions were sent to only men, while in 2021, the data showed 36.7%.
  • The gender wage gap narrowed in many places but opportunity access remains a challenge. In most markets or locations, the gender wage gap narrowed. In the US, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco/Bay Area and Boston metropolitan areas had the narrowest reported wage gaps, in that order. Outside the US, London showed the widest wage gap with women being offered £0.91 for every £1 offered to men in 2021. However, some of the markets with the most narrow wage gaps (Denver, Boston and Seattle) also showed the largest underrepresentation of women candidates receiving interview requests compared to male counterparts.
  • The wage gap persists for remote roles. There was a gender wage gap found among remote jobs and local jobs – when examining expectation of salaries and final salaries of roles, with remote gender wage gaps showing to be slightly wider than those of local jobs/roles. In other words, remote jobs had wider wage and expectation gaps versus local jobs.
  • Race impacts the number of interview requests for candidates. In 2021, companies continued to increase their interview requests for diverse candidates. Interview requests to only white jobseekers (23.2% to 14.8%) or only white and Asian jobseekers decreased from 2020 to 2021 (61.4% to 49.0%).
  • LGBTQIA+ impact remains low: LGBTQIA+ jobseekers remain overrepresented in interview requests relative to jobseekers who identify as straight and cisgender – but showed a decrease in overrepresentation in interview requests in 2021 (2.8% in 2021 versus 14.1% more on average in 2020). There is a very narrow wage gap for LGBTQIA+ jobseekers versus non-LGBTQIA+ jobseekers (0.4% overall).

The sixth annual report analyzes wage and expectation gaps in salary data across gender, race, age and sexuality in the tech industry. The findings are based on Hired’s proprietary data from over 819,000 interview requests and job offers facilitated through Hired’s marketplace from over 3,900 participating companies and more than 120,000 jobseekers in the US, UK and Canada.

“It’s been an ever-shifting and evolving hiring landscape for employers and jobseekers over the last few years – from companies competing and sourcing for talent at a record pace, to the current state of macroeconomic uncertainty driving more measured hiring,” said Josh Brenner, CEO at Hired. “This report shows that there is still work to be done in ensuring equitable hiring processes to narrow wage and expectation gaps, and companies must prioritize this effort. Post-Great Resignation, companies that are successful in identifying non-traditional talent, while also ensuring diversity and representation in their candidate pipelines, will be better positioned to drive their businesses forward in a time of increased volatility.”

Hired also found that companies using Diversity Goals, its new tool that helps companies prioritize outreach to underrepresented talent without removing relevant matching candidates, were able to more than double their pipeline of underrepresented candidates. Consequently, these companies using the new tool had both a lower wage and expectation gap compared to companies with the tool option turned off.

To access the data report, visit the State of Wage Inequality in the Tech Industry: Hired’s 2022 Impact Report.