[abraca]

I'm surprised. In a technical PM role a few years ago I found out that I earned 20-40% less than other PM's at the company. There were more than a dozen PM's and I was the only woman who was mid-level seniority. My male direct report made almost the same as me, while my female direct reports made a lot less. In my case it was not due to lack of initial negotiation, but that at each promotion I didn't get a sufficient bump (and since I was getting a raise, I felt grateful instead of negotiating in middle of promotion/raise!) Second reason, was that a lot of the male PM's had threatened to leave in the past and negotiated their raises that way, whereas I had never done that. Since then, I have negotiated HARD for every position I've taken and have not hesitated to turn down jobs if I'm not confident that they are offering me 50th percentile relative to men in the role. I've also encouraged women to find out salary data for their peers in order to get raises. Often when someone leaves the company they will openly tell you their salary or if you are friends they will just tell you. In so many cases, where a woman is one of only 1-2 women out of 15-20+ men, it turns out that she is making far less than men who have previously held her role or been in same role. It's strange to me that HR never seems to pick up on things like this!! Seems like the first thing you'd check given all the publicity on issue. Anyway I've only seen negotiation work well (even where a woman is making way less than peers) where the woman has also gotten a competing offer, so that's number 1 thing I encourage.

[xyzzyz]

> It's strange to me that HR never seems to pick up on things like this!!

I don't think it is strange at all -- after all, it is in the company best interest to pay the employees as little as necessary. Engineers benefit company by building products. HR benefit company by (among other things) figuring out how to save money on salaries.

[varjag]

It's actually in the name. You are a resource for a purchasing department. I can't understand how people come to assume HR is on their side: it's not a union.

[Lawtonfogle]

The best way to fix this is to create a social pressure to be open about salaries. Some want to fix this by teaching better negotiation skills to those who are poor at it, but as long as the social pressure is to hide this data, it is going to keep being a problem regardless if the cause is racism, sexism, classism, or just difference in negotiation skills.

[the_af]

Fully agreed. In some countries there is a taboo about openly discussing salaries, but keeping them secret only helps employers and hurts the negotiating power of employees.

[nqzero]

very good advice and applies to guys too. the goal for both management and HR is to pay as little as possible (to the point that we see the outright collusion of the apple/adobe/google price fixing). so get competing offers and then play hardball

[walshemj]

And even out side of that big companies participate in closed access salary surveys that are not disclosed publicly.

[nedwin]

Where I work they're trying to combat this by creating tighter, more objective definitions of levels and putting people in those. The salary bands within a level are relatively small.

This cuts out a lot of the crap. You can still negotiate but not outside of band.

[shostack]

So outside of a few large companies and a few types of jobs with fairly consistent job titles/responsibilities, Glassdoor is fairly poor for employees conducting their own salary research.

Have you found any services or tools that are more accurate that you'd recommend?

[abraca]

I recommend looking up the company and job title on an h1b jobs database. There are several sites online that pull from public data. You get both start date and title information. It only shows base salary but the nice thing is that it is an accurate number.

[ryanSrich]

I've found two methods to be fairly accurate. Find the average for you job on Glassdoor and add 20%. Or find someone that has a similar job at the company and ask them what they make.