Black Tech Professionals Face Ongoing Salary Gap
Hispanic tech workers also find salaries lag behind white and Asian colleagues, though that gap narrows
The gap between the average salary offered to black tech professionals and that offered to white tech professionals is closing at a snail’s pace. According to a recent analysis by job search firm Hired, in 2019 black tech professionals were offered an average of US $10,000 a year less than white tech workers. That’s slightly better than the 2018 gap of $11,000, but not much.
Meanwhile, Hispanic tech professionals lag $3000 behind their white counterparts, down from $7000 in 2018. Asians, having pulled ahead in recent years, continue to command a slight edge in average salaries over their white colleagues.
These numbers came from Hired’s analysis of 425,000 interview requests and job offers made to tech professionals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom during 2019, published as part of Hired’s 2020 State of Salaries report.
Within each racial group, tech professionals who identified themselves as female received lower average salary offers than their male counterparts, according to Hired’s 2020 State of Wage Inequality in the Workplace report, released in March.
Tekla S. Perry is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., she's been covering the people, companies, and technology that make Silicon Valley a special place for more than 40 years. An IEEE member, she holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Michigan State University.