Women in networking

Women and job satisfaction Come payday, it's good to be you Salary calculator

The network industry prides itself on how well it rewards the bright and hardworking. But when payday rolls around, women typically don't fair as well as men, according to the 2003 Network World Salary Survey.

The mean 2003 salary across all job titles is $75,300 for men compared with $64,370 for women, a nearly 17% difference. This, even though female respondents are slightly older (44 vs. 43), have more tenure (9.39 years vs. 7.69), and work more hours per week (63.76 vs. 60.81), all significant influences on pay. What they don't tend to have are the higher-level job titles.

While some might say blatant sexism is at work, the real reasons for the discrepancy are complex, network professionals say. Based on their own or co-workers' experiences, survey respondents say these issues are at heart:

• Woman might be more likely to sacrifice pay for other job satisfaction criteria, such as challenge of work or work/life balance. While men and women generally want the same things from a job, women consistently rate quality of work/life issues higher than men. For instance, "advancement potential," No. 8 on men's list for job satisfaction, doesn't even make the Top 10 for women. Leave (vacations, holidays, etc.) is on the list instead. (See graphic.)
  
  
• When a woman is also a mother, she might have less personal time to use to advance her skills as quickly as her male or childless female co-workers. She might not volunteer for as many skills-expanding assignments, because they often require long stints of overtime, or be able to spend her off-hours earning certificates.
  
  
• Men far out number women in the networking industry, with women more likely to be in the lower-paying areas such as training, the help desk or basic system administrator jobs.
  
  
• Women in IT, and particularly networking, say that don't feel that the pay inequity is automatic, and they note that there's less of a gap in this industry than many others (such as banking). When they step up and ask for more challenging work and negotiate hard for their salaries, they feel they will get paid equally to their male counterparts.
  
  

- Julie Bort 

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