Wired Women: Catching up to the Boys

— -- Girl geeks are closing in on the economic Holy Grail — unless they live in Bill Gates’ neighborhood.

A new report says the average woman in high tech is earning 92 cents for every dollar her male counterpart earns. Better yet, newbie nerds earn the same salaries regardless of gender: workers who have been in the IT marketplace for fewer than five years are earning equal pay.

You got it: equal pay for equal work. Regardless of gender.

This is progress.

But the same study says a Silicon Valley girl geek who’s making 97 cents for every dollar the guys make will watch that proportion plummet to 89 cents if she moves to Seattle.

“If you’re a woman and you’re talking about the gender gap, the Northwest seems to have more of a problem with it than the Deep South, or the Midwest, or the East Coast, or Silicon Valley,” says Shuman Lee, director of Analytics at techies.com, which produced the study. “If you look at the Seattle market in particular, the gap is 89 percent.”

In seeking response from the software giant, its public relations offices had this to say: "Microsoft has decided not to take advantage of this opportunity to respond."

Crunching Numbers

The study was produced in December by techies.com, a career site that requires its 700,000 members to provide extensive information about their education, job histories, and current salaries. Lee culls subsets of those data to examine market trends and working conditions.

The gender gap study included data on 87,075 men and 19,058 women who hold entry-level to executive technology positions in 39 major U.S. job markets. The gender imbalance in the sample reflects the gender imbalance in techies.com database — and in the high-tech market in general.

Lee acknowledges that his sample is not a representative cross-section of all technology workers. His subjects include only those tech workers who have registered at techies.com, who have self-reported their income and job history information, and who are probably looking for a new position.