When financial technology company SmartAsset released its annual Top 15 Cities for Women in Tech rankings for 2020, Houston was the biggest large city on the list, which was dominated by smaller locales. Houston came in at No. 8 this year, dropping a few notches from No. 4 in 2019’s rankings.
In fact, Houston has made the cut in five of the six years SmartAsset has compiled the list. But what’s more surprising is one of the metrics used to determine the rankings.
Women working in the tech industry in Houston earn 99 percent of what their male counterparts are paid, according to SmartAsset, which used data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A.J. Smith, SmartAsset’s vice president of financial education, said Houston’s number was a good one, pointing to the national average that saw women in tech earn 83 percent of their male counterparts’ salaries. The data behind the pay gap comes from the Census Bureau’s five-year American Community Survey for 2018, she said.
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Nationally, tech gap between what men and women in tech earned has expanded. In 2015, women earned nearly 87 percent of what men did. Houston’s is the second-best pay gap on the list, behind Long Beach, Calif., where women on average earn 2 percent more than male tech workers.
Over time, Houston’s pay gap has narrowed, even as the national number has gotten worse. In 2015, the first year of the best-cities-for-women rankings, Houston was No. 4 overall and had a pay gap of nearly 6 percent, with women earning 94.1 percent of what men did.
Houston was missing from the list in 2016, but reappeared at No. 15 at 87.7 percent. In 2017, it was No. 11 overall at 94 percent. For 2018, Houston leaped to No. 4 and hit the 1 percent pay gap mark.
Given the tech pay gap nationally, and the fact that Houston is still seeking recognition as a city known for tech and innovation, the narrow gap may seem suspect. But female founders and tech executives in Houston say it makes sense, given the unique nature of the technology sector here.
“It’s not surprising to me when I think about the business landscape of Houston,” said Carolyn Rodz, the founder of Alice, an online community of about 100,000 small business owners from around the world.
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Rodz said that the industries that are among the cornerstones of Houston’s economy — energy, medicine, aerospace — are known as progressive ones.
“And a lot of these are very large corporations, and they have been pressured the most to address these pay gaps,” she said. “Houston is such a corporate city, and so that may have a lot to do with it.”
Houston’s diversity also plays a part, Rodz said.
“Diversity ingrains certain values in the city,” she said. “My theory would be that having a more diverse ecosystem supports the argument for more awareness of inequity.”
Her own company has 19 full-time employees, the majority of whom are women. Rodz said she strives to make sure people with the same titles and duties have equal pay, and will adjust salaries in a given category if needed.
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The technology industry, particularly in Silicon Valley, she said, has come under fire for pay inequity, so the 83 percent discount paid to women in tech nationally is “not surprising.”
Kathleen Perley, who founded a digital advertising firm called Decode Digital, said she was surprised to hear that Houston’s tech pay gap is so small, adding she would have thought it would be more than that.
“I started my own company because of that pay discrepancy,” Perley said. “It’s still happening in the tech industry in general.”
If there is little pay inequity in Houston tech, Perley suspects competition for tech workers here may have something to do with it.
“It’s so good when you get good talent in Houston, because it’s getting harder to find that talent. People are paying top dollar,” she said.
Pure tech companies in Houston compete for talent with the big industries, particularly oil and gas, Perley added. Making matters worse is that tech talent is often poached by companies in Austin and San Francisco, she said.
Katie Mehnert, who has worked for big energy companies, is the owner of Pink Petro, a social media platform designed to tell the stories of women and minorities in oil and gas. She agreed with Rodz that the energy business is a big reason why Houston’s pay gap is small.
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“It’s not just white-collar jobs that are well-paying in oil and gas,” Mehnert said. “Work in the petrochemical plants, and in field-operations roles, also pay well.”
Mehnert said the oil and gas business is undergoing a transformation as it relies more on sophisticated technology ranging from mining big data to artificial intelligence to the use of drones and robotics. That has made it hungry for tech workers, even if their background isn’t necessarily in energy.
PinkPetro has nine employees, most of them women, and Mehnert doesn’t have a formal system for ensuring pay equity.
“There are benchmarks, pay scales, I’m constantly looking at the data and government reports around income levels,” she said.
Steve Werner, a professor of management and chair of the Management and Leadership Department at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business, said Houston has become more cosmopolitan, and that has helped close the pay gap between men and women in tech.
“In Houston, you have a smaller pool of tech talent, and if you discriminate, you further reduce that pool of talent,” said Werner, whose academic focus is on compensation. “From a rational sense, you would never discriminate.”
Of course, that’s not always the case. Alice’s Rodz said she still runs into surprising attitudes, and had one disheartening experience when her company was talking to investors about a new round of funding.
“One of the people we were talking to said in a meeting, ‘As a mother, how can you be leading a company?’” she recalled.
Rodz said she stopped the interview and “gave feedback in the moment” to the investor.
“We did not take money from them,” she said.
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2020-02-21 10:00:00Z
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/texas-inc/article/Missing-in-Houston-tech-A-pay-gap-between-men-15071932.php
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