Black Tech Professionals Are Still Paid Less Than Their White Colleagues

Closing at a snail ‘s rate is the difference between the average salary offered to black tech professionals and what is offered to white tech professionals. In 2019, black tech professionals were paid an average of US$ 10,000 a year less than white tech employees, according to an report by job search company Hired. That’s marginally better than the $11,000 deficit in 2018 but not much more than that.

Hispanic engineering workers, meanwhile, lagged $3,000 behind their white colleagues, down from $7,000 in 2019. Having pushed ahead in recent years, Asian tech workers tend to maintain a small lead in average wages over their white counterparts.

Within each ethnic category, according to Hired ‘s 2020 State of Wage Discrimination in the Workforce Study, tech professionals who described themselves as women earned lower average compensation offers than their male counterparts, published earlier this year.

One promising takeaway from Hired ‘s 2020 State of Salaries Report was that tech wages grew in 2019 in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, with the U.S. average of up to $146,000 (an 8 percent increase over 2018) and the average of up to $130,000 in all three regions (an increase of less than 1 percent).

Or the trend would at least have been promising if things hadn’t changed so much between the end of 2019 and today. Under normal circumstances, the details found in Hired’s wage report should be interpreted as a trend line that should proceed into the year ahead. But what it means right now, during the coronavirus pandemic, is the guess of everyone.

“Tech headquarters are closing, work from home is new standard, use of Amazon and Netflix is soaring, well-known tech unicorns like Uber , Lyft, and Airbnb lay thousands off,” the Hired study says.

Moreover, Facebook aims to adjust wages up or down based on living costs, in return for the right to work remotely. It remains uncertain if the new standard will ever return to the old one.

Nonetheless, it is worth looking at the progress achieved in 2019, because we will definitely be referring to those figures as we track the landscape of engineering employment before and after the pandemic.

Tech employees in Austin and Toronto, according to Hired ‘s report, saw the biggest rise in wage offers, both up 10 per cent over 2018.

Still, the average tech salaries in the San Francisco Bay Area remained highest in terms of raw numbers, averaging $155,000 (up 7 percent) in 2019. However, as wages are adjusted for the cost of living many areas are well ahead of the San Francisco Bay Area: for example, Austin’s $137,000 annual salary for 2019 is equal to a $224,000 salary in the Bay Area. Yet recent announcements by big tech companies about changing wages based on living costs while relocating their workers can change the image in the next 12 months.