Satya Nadella
Satya Nadella

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last week inadvertently put the tech industry’s gender gap in the spotlight by saying that women shouldn’t ask for raises but instead rely on good karma and the system to do right by them. After apologizing and retracting the statement, he noted in a memo to employees that “the overall differences in base pay among genders and races (when we consider level and job title) is consistently within 0.5% at Microsoft.”

“For example, last year women in the US at the same title and level earned 99.7% of what men earned at the same title and level,” he wrote as he outlined new steps to address the problem at Microsoft. “In any given year, any particular group may be slightly above or slightly below 100 percent.”

So what does this actually look like?

We don’t have Microsoft’s internal stats in more detail, but new numbers released by employment review site Glassdoor provide more detail about the pay gap at Microsoft and other tech companies, based on salary reports from a sample of employees.

In limited cases, the stats show that women with the same job titles are making more than their male counterparts. But overall the numbers suggest a significant wage gap based on gender. In some cases the gap is more pronounced than Microsoft is letting on with its aggregated stats.

Here’s the chart from Glassdoor.

Tech Company Salary Comparison by Gender

These numbers are limited by several factors, including the fact that they are based solely on title and not the level of an employee within the company. Gender is also an optional disclosure for the employees who anonymously volunteer this information, which further limits the data.

Glassdoor says it plans to further explore this issue and provide more stats as they’re available.

For the record, according to another Glassdoor measure, Satya Nadella has an 83 percent approval rating among Microsoft employees — still well ahead of his predecessor, Steve Ballmer.

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