Gender Pay Difference Largest Among Computer Programmers, Study Finds

There are still large gender salary gaps between male works and female works and among programmers it's the largest difference according to new study.

According to new research from Glassdoor, a website where current and former employees anonymously rate and leave reviews of the companies and management that they worked for.

The report, based more than 500,000 anonymously shared employee salaries, discoverd that the biggest pay difference-- adjusted for experience, education, position, location, and industry -- existed among specific types of computer programmers, with men making on average 28.3% more than their female colleagues.

Among programmers, scientific and mainframe computer coders saw the biggest gap. Huge gaps also existed in tech jobs such as video game artists (15.8%), information security specialists (14.7%) and front-end engineers (9.7%).

 It also identified, similar to what other studies have revealed, that there is a widespread, "unadjusted" gap that shows women making 76 percent of what men are making. (The Census Bureau estimates that it's 79 percent; Pew Research Center found a few years ago that it was 84 percent.)

There may be various reasons why such big gaps exist, but one reason can be , according to Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor who spearheaded the report, is workplace bias.

"My view is that in heavily male-dominated fields, the people who are making the decisions about pay and promotion are disproportionately men, and that can play a role in why we're seeing gaps in male and female pay," he said. "It's not the case in every one of these occupations, but it's the case in these tech fields."

As American workers aiming toward gender equality in the workplace, pay transparency can play a signficant role in assisting going towards full equality in male-female salary in the workplace.