All companies have pay ranges for each position. Depending on the size of the company they might have many ranges; junior engineer, mid-level engineer, senior engineer, staff engineer, architect, etc...
Each of those ranges will have a min and a max pay range. For example a junior programmer might start at 65k and the top is 78k a year.
If the company wants to hire an individual, the hiring manager has flexibility to offer higher pay than their competitors.
In the tech industry, you have what we call “rock stars” and then there’s the average, then there’s the “dead wood”. Guaranteed that your rock stars already make or will eventually make more than the other two categories.
I work with a lot of “rock stars”. Men and women who have amazing intelligence and skill. And I doubt very strongly that any of them make the same amount of money. They maybe in the same salary range, but the exact amounts will differ.
I work for a fortune 50 company($100 billion and 100k employees). Now, to be open and honest, for what it’s worth, all the “super coders” are all men. By that I mean the Sheldon Cooper(Big Bang Theory) level geniuses are all men. Some very bright women for sure that I would hire in a minute. But the real producers, the architects -programmers who design large and complex systems, the real computer nerds -the “super coders”, are all men. Those are the ones who are always going to be paid more because they are worth more.
I’m guessing the differences in performance was being noticed by HR so they came up with a really embarrassing women’s recognition program. They created a special web page for this new initiative to recognize women. So they picked a couple dozen women and posted their pictures on the web page with a list of their “accomplishments”. I’m guessing they did that because of the lack of patents and other overt recognition given to the men as a matter of their real accomplishments.
Kind of like a participation trophy to hedge against law suits like the one at Google.
...Didn’t really like the way my last post came off after posting. What is missing is that men tend to not just work on computers but also tend to spend a good portion of their lives on computers. That’s their life.
So, they do tend to work longer hours, and get off on being a “super coder”. Very few woman have that mentality.
I’ve seen at least one scientific write up that discussed the difference between men and women in this light. That it’s a product of testosterone that makes men competitive to the point of obsession. Which makes men like Mozart, Beethoven, and Oppenheimer. Their obsession and drive lead them to greatness. Women don’t reach that level of obsession.
That study also pointed out that the same biological forces that drive some men to greatness also leave some men at the extreme low end of the intelligence scale. Men tend to be on the extremes of high and low and women are in the middle. So even though you won’t find a female Beethoven, the lowest human IQ’s will always be male.
That equates to higher performance. In a neutral environment, the higher performing group is going to be rewarded slightly more, always.