Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Salary Survey Post #3: The Role of Gender

So everyone says men get paid more than women.  This fact is well documented across the board.  But in an industry where women dominate in numbers, is this still true?

COMPLETELY.

Now, disclaimer – when breaking things down by gender, for full time people we found that there were 71 female respondents, 21 male respondents, and the rest did not say if they were male or female.  So I am aware that comparing a data set of 71 and one of 21 is not completely accurate (although representative of the population in question), but heck yes, we are gonna do it anyways, folks.

The salary averages male vs. female (remember that our overall salary average was $40,360.76):

Average Male Salary: $48,452.38

Average Female Salary: $36,338.03

(That means the average male salary is ~$12,000 more than the average female salary).

To be fair, we can’t really make this bold claim due to the sample size and such.  When I made the numbers into percentages, we get this graph, which is a bit closer to the truth…

image

So there you have it folks.  You can see the “bell curve” shape for both males and females.  You can see that the male’s center point  is around $10,000 more than females.

‘Nuff said.

We are going to further later in the week (or next week, as both Kirsten and I are having hugely busy weeks with our actual jobs) with gender and satisfaction, salary and experience, salary and education, etc.  I will also go deeper into breaking down gender and salary and years experience as much as possible with such a limited data set. 

Thoughts on the whole gender and salary thing?  Why, when there are 3/4 (or more…does anyone have a figure on this?) females in the field, males are still paid more than us on average?  Angry yet?

4 comments:

  1. Yet another thing we haven't graphed yet. It's on the list!

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  2. Just a thought as a devil's advocate. Could it be that there are lots more smaller museums (with smaller budget and lower wages) that only hire women? What if larger museums would hire equal amount. It would skew the results.

    This is a possibility as there are (a) very few museums with larger budgets and (b) many more women answering your survey.

    So, is it right to say male are paid more on average when these results don't reference the possible gulf in museum sizes?

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  3. Good thought on the smaller museums vs. larger museums. That's actually another question we didn't ask. (Racking 'em up!) We should make sure to do so in the future. I do wonder how many small museums only employ women. The house museum I work at (about as small as these things get) is a part of a convocation (might be misusing that word) of house museums and staff is solidly 1/3 male. I also wonder how comfortable museos would be answering questions about their museum's budgets. Hmmm.

    That said, I agree with you. There's something amiss with the male salaries though we're not quite sure what it is/how to get a more representative sample.

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