"Lack of opportunities for advancement" is a problem for tech workers, Male or Female.
Engineering graduates get high pay at the beginning of their careers, but what the statistics don't tell you is that, unlike their peers, they don't get raises.
If you are a programmer/IT person at many organizations, you might find that your organization has advancement paths for (say) salespeople, geospatial analysts, librarians, etc. but no paths for technical people.
Interesting. Now that I think about it, every single one of my networking and/or sysadmin friends have realized significant upward mobility in the past decade. any of my programming friends have either gone freelance or simply changed employers for pay increases.
Being a programmer is a lot more like skilled blue collar job such being a plumber or an electrician than we like to admit.
What kind of career advancement do those fields have? Pretty close to what we have. Maybe you supervise/manage a group less experienced tradesmen. Maybe you open your own small business or go freelance. The result is the same ceiling where real, continual advancement is on the business management side.
Exactly. When I read that in the article I was stunned. It used to be pretty standard it'd take 5+ years to make a senior engineer role, another 1 or 2 for a lead, and even more for architect which can be a slightly different path.
> A study by the Center for Talent Innovation found that 27% of women in tech feel stalled in their careers and 32% are likely to quit within one year; 48% of Black women in tech feel stalled.
One year?! I've been out of school for over 15 years and most of the time moving sideways. You've got to put in the time and effort. For most a senior role is all they'll achieve (or want).
Some relevant numbers: one of the article's statistics is that of American women in science, engineering, and tech, 27% feel stalled and 32% are likely to quit within a year.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if these are higher than the male numbers, but I'm disappointed the source doesn't have any male numbers. It's pretty well established that software companies are bad offering raises that match job-change gains, and consequently have lots of turnover. I'd love to know what that that produces across genders in terms of feeling stalled or odds or quitting.
>>Engineering graduates get high pay at the beginning of their careers, but what the statistics don't tell you is that, unlike their peers, they don't get raises.
That's not as big of a problem as it sounds. Starting your career making lots of money is better than starting with lower pay and getting raises along the way, even if your end salary in the latter scenario ends up being higher (to a point).
The reason is simple: compound interest. If you start off with $100k you can start saving (and investing) much earlier. In contrast, making a lot of money later in your career isn't as helpful.
Of course, this only tackles the financial aspect. I think career advancement is important for psychological reasons as well, such as feeling fulfilled.
Don't get raises? What do you mean? Are you referring to non-technology companies?
I'm curious if there are any numbers out there on the senior-to-junior salary ratio for various professions, corrected for time. I wonder which professions have the lowest and highest salary increase rates, and the mean time to hitting the salary ceiling for a profession.
In years when I stay with my current company, I barely get a COLA raise of around 2%. When I switch companies, even involuntarily, I can often get an immediate 10% to 20% gain over my previous pay.
This tells me that my employers do not look at current market rates when adjusting employee pay rates.
There are detailed survey data regarding actuary pay scales at https://www.dwsimpson.com/salary . It looks like they start lower than software pros, but grow faster and top out higher (everywhere outside of Silicon Valley).
It may be location-dependent. Here in Canada, I know that dev salary increase a little less than two-fold between the time you get hired after school and whenever you get to 7-10 years of experience. Of course, one needs to change job a few times as raises within a company rarely increases that much.
Starting salary is also a lot lower when freshly out of school here than what you could get in SV.
Engineering graduates get high pay at the beginning of their careers, but what the statistics don't tell you is that, unlike their peers, they don't get raises.
If you are a programmer/IT person at many organizations, you might find that your organization has advancement paths for (say) salespeople, geospatial analysts, librarians, etc. but no paths for technical people.