The 2018 Data Professional Salary Survey is open now, and you can look at the live responses as they come in. (To get that in Excel, click File, Download.) As of this writing (Dec 23), there’s already over 2,500 responses, so I’m going to take a look at a few things to see how it’s shaping up.
- 64% (1,626) of responses are from the United States
- Of those, 50% (809) are DBAs (either dev, general, or production focus)
- 776 use Microsoft SQL Server their primary database
I’m going to focus on those just because it’s a large group of people with a lot in common, but if you want to do your own spelunking, by all means, grab the raw data and do your own slicing and dicing.
I’m going to focus on the female and male gender responses – there have only been a few non-binary responses, not enough to draw conclusions. I also took out the top 10 rows & bottom 10 rows by pay because they’re wild outliers – again, a real data scientist much more qualified than me should be doing a better analysis.
The remaining population:
DBAs by gender
Is there a gender gap in salary?
Drumroll please…
The gender gap
I’m no data scientist, but those numbers are pretty far apart.
So, why? Why are female DBAs paid less?
Can the survey tell us if there’s some other correlation – not causation, necessarily, but at least correlation? Is there a difference in experience, maybe? How much experience have you got with this database?
Experience by gender
Uh, no. Maybe the guys have been doing this particular job longer. Let’s see:
Women have been on the job longer
HAHAHA, wow. Women have been on the job longer than men, a lot longer.
That might actually be interesting – from anecdotal experience, I’ve heard that as your skills grow, you need to jump shops in order to get a raise to cover what you’re worth. But again, someone with more data science experience than me will need to dig in there.
Or maybe it’s because more guys manage staff. Do you manage other staff?
Amazing similarity
Uh, no, that’s not it either. Maybe the guys work in a different kind of shop with more coworkers. How many other people in your team do the same job as you?
Team size
Team sizes aren’t wildly out of whack. Do the guys have more education?
Education by gender
No, more guys are dropouts, and more women have Masters. How about certifications?
Certifications by gender
More women are currently certified.
There’s more dimensions you can slice & dice with, and I’ll leave that up to the pros. I’m curious to see what they find. Hey, I’m doing my job as a DBA – I’m empowering you to use the data.
Take the survey, and you can download the live raw data here (for Excel, click File, Download.) We’ll close the survey on January 7.