Nearly half a century ago, the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was ratified to ensure that men and women doing similar work would be paid an equal wage. The law stipulated that neither the jobs nor the titles need be identical, but if they require substantially equal skills, effort and responsibility, the wage must be equal.
The US has come a long way toward equality in wages since then, and most companies attempt to maintain the spirit of the law – if not holding to the letter. Still, there is room for improvement.
When we think of equality, this year will be remembered for centuries. A woman came within an eyelash of a presidential nomination on a major party ticket, another woman was nominated for vice president for only the second time in US history and our nation ultimately elected our first African-American president. Many barriers were broken, but the sad truth remains that paycheck equality wasn’t one of them.
According to the AFL-CIO, women were paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by men for comparable positions in 2007. Some studies have shown that the earning gap widens as education increases. The 2008 PCB Designer Salary Survey supports some of these general findings and refutes others. For this particular snapshot, we looked at US designers only. Broken down by gender, respondents were 14% female and 86% male. Here’s what the numbers showed.
In the area of overall compensation, female designers in the US took home 94 cents for every dollar the men earned. While not perfect, it is much closer to equal than the national average. In comparing base salaries of female and male designers (without bonuses), the gap narrows further, to 98 cents for every dollar. Overall, PCB and system designers beat the national average for engineering positions, for which women make, on average, 93 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts, 10 years after graduation from a bachelor’s program.
In our survey, education did make a difference but did not favor equality. All the women who participated had at least some college or an AA/AS degree. By contrast, almost 10% of male respondents reported no post-secondary education. Seventy percent of the women respondents reported some type of degree, from AA/AS through MSEE.
In our survey, the salary gap for women with advanced degrees was the widest. In that instance, women earned just 60 cents for every dollar earned by a man with an advanced degree. (It should be noted that the sample size for designers with advanced degrees was very small.) Additional data is needed to better understand the effect of an advanced degree on the salary gap.
Having said that, a number of studies support the fact that education benefits women less than men in the paycheck department. A recent study was conducted by the AAUW in which US Census Bureau findings were analyzed, the report indicated that women with a four-year degree earned 76 cents for every dollar earned by similarly educated men. Louisiana had the biggest gap, with women earning only 64 cents for every dollar men earned. In some fields, women actually earned more than men in the first year after graduation, only to lose the advantage after 10 years in the workplace.
Indeed, the AAUW engineering sector data shows that one year after graduation, women were actually ahead of men, earning $1.05 for every dollar men earned, but that advantage slipped to 93 cents after 10 years in the workforce. At the current rate of change, paycheck equality for all remains quite a few years away. It is estimated that a measurable earning gap will continue until 2050 – almost 100 years after laws were enacted to enforce equality.
Regardless of the national statistics, we found that, overall, female PCB designers are extremely competitive with their male counterparts. In 2008, 68% earned a salary increase and 57% got a bonus. Most female designers (61%) believe their salaries are comparable to the industry norm. A smaller group (32%) believe they make less and 7% thought they made more.
The vast majority, 71%, are very satisfied with their career choice, and 25% are very satisfied with their current job. On the topic of compensation, 25% said they were very satisfied with their compensation, and another 32% said they were satisfied. Only 18% were dissatisfied.
We would like to thank everyone who participated in the survey. We collected quite a bit of data, and I will be presenting more of it in various venues over the next few months. The complete salary survey can be found here.
