Education platforms are the key to closing the gender wage gap in tech

Despite the added pressure on creating equitable and accessible workspaces for women, fair compensation remains a common pain point in most industries — especially tech. 

In fact, a 2021 survey from recruiting platform Hired found that men were offered higher salaries than women for the same tech job title and position at the same company 59% of the time. On average, women were offered salaries 2.5%  lower, and when interviewing for open roles, companies were found to be interviewing only men for open positions 41% of the time and only women 4% of the time — a figure almost unchanged over the past three years.

"When a man asks for more money it's seen as ambitious," says Jennifer Schwab, co-founder and CEO of female-focused EdTech company Entity Academy. "Whereas if a woman asks for the same thing, she's often seen as aggressive and like she's asking for too much. It can be off- putting, and companies will treat her as if she's not worth that, which it's something that we have to address." 

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For almost a decade, Entity has been focusing on upskilling and reskilling women looking to advance their careers in the tech sector by offering them virtual and in-person training for positions such as data science and digital marketing. Most of the programs the platform offers are rigorous eight-month and part-time programs, where participants have to commit approximately 20 hours a week for successful completion. But the difficulty level of the programs is only to ensure that women are well-prepared for an equally harsh job market.

Not only is the industry unaccommodating to the women presently working in it, but as of 2022, only 25% of tech graduates were women, according to tech industry insight platform CIO. STEM courses also have a dropout rate of 37% for tech classes compared to just 30% for other programs, making a diverse recruiting process equally as hard. 

"It's all about creating pathways for women into the appropriate career that's going to allow them to have a dignified living and growth while also being a good fit for their raw skill set, as well as the skills that they're willing to learn," Schwab says. "We're ensuring that these are careers they can really excel in."

Schwab recently spoke to EBN about the work Entity is doing to ​​provide more career placement opportunities in tech to women all over the world, and how that will, in turn, begin to eliminate compensation disparity in the industry at large.

Why was it so important for you to focus on STEM jobs in your work with Entity?
There are so many tech jobs available at tech firms and traditional companies that are part of the Fortune 500 industry and part of the Dow Jones industry. Everybody is going through digital transformation, so the amount of opportunities that exist in STEM are insurmountable relative to other areas of the economy and we wanted to make sure that women participate in it. 

How did you make sure that Entity's work not only enabled that kind of participation from women workers, but also made an impact on closing the wage gap?
Helping students with their interview skills, and helping them negotiate their pay and present their value can have a direct impact on closing the pay gap. Additionally, when we're working on the other side of the spectrum with our employers, we are also educating them on where we think women should enter salary-wise based on their skill set. Being in business for seven years, we have significant employer relationships that allow us to talk through somebody's background with them. For example, maybe a candidate doesn't shine on paper the way somebody who's coming out of an Ivy League school with a very pedigreed history would, but we can talk through why that candidate deserves to be paid a certain amount with employers. That's why we're a very high-touch service for women, because we believe that high-touch, white glove service is the best way to help women secure employment at a fair salary level.

When you say "high-touch," how does that speak to the experience of the women you serve?
I've often been asked "why don't you automate technical mentorship?" Because you can take the questions that students are most often asking and just put it in the form of a chatbot and have the quoted answers prepared. But there's nothing like building a relationship with your technical mentor or your instructors to make the learning experience stick. And this goes back to emotion — if you have an emotional connection with learning the content while you're learning the content, your retention of the information is going to be much greater and it triggers your long-term memory. We're not only in the business of educating people, we want them to retain this information. It is complex to learn a whole new vertical, a whole new skill set, so retention is extremely important, especially because much of our content is cumulative knowledge that requires a cumulative learning experience.

How does the work Entity does and the way the program is set up directly impact women's lives and better their career prospects?
If someone were to enroll with us tomorrow, we would take them through a welcome orientation and an onboarding, and then they would immediately engage in their first hard skills module, which would be an introductory class on skills such as data science. On top of hard skill training, they are also going to be introduced to soft skills and other employability skills that help them advance in the job through a number of ancillary programs that surround the hard technical skills curriculum, which includes business acumen training and critical thinking workshops. We have a platform where students can engage with each other around a topic, and it's also where our mentors and coaches can address the student questions on the platform.

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Additionally, once the students are in the eighth or ninth inning of the program, they can opt into our Career Services programming where they'll receive help with their LinkedIn profile. We have something called our resume production engine, where we will take a student's existing resume and help polish it through our editors and our designers, which will give them a standard resume that looks much more presentable to prospective employers. We also take a snapshot of their final projects and put that as an additional page in their portfolio, because hiring managers often don't want to go on sites like GitHub to look through all of the students' work and we're trying to make it simple for employers to get a gist of what they're capable of. 

In your experience, how will the industry as a whole have to change in order for your efforts to close the wage gap be successful long-term?
I've noticed that there are companies proactively making an effort to look at the skills an employee has when determining where their salary should be. We are working with a number of projects with model employers that are really trying to address the inequities in society by providing fair compensation packages. If that mentality could be spread to the Fortune 2000 companies out there, we would not only see the wage gap close faster, but we would also see inequality addressed in our society as a whole. The trickle down of that trend is really powerful because that would also take the university system and turn it on its head as well. All of a sudden, if women don't need to get a prestigious four-year degree in order to break into spaces, that could greatly impact the amount of debt that students have to carry after graduation, as well as their ability to get their foot in the door. 

The gender pay gap — and addressing it — can be a very emotionally taxing endeavor for women. How are your coaches equipped to help them work through it without burning them out?
We have different types of mentors, and each week in students' program they have access to at least 30 minutes of one-on-one technical mentorship with your top technical mentors who have either gone through our program or are in industry positions. Secondly, we bring in role models and industry leaders — both female and male allies who just want to help women get ahead — and we put them on panels with a major media moderator who would ask them particular questions relative to their field or their company. We've had mentors from PayPal, Facebook, Google and Netflix that do these hour-long sessions and end it with Q&A-type sessions where our students prepare questions to ask in advance. This also helps our students build a network because many of these mentors are committed to seeing Entity help close the wage gap and help women enter into these jobs with a level of comfort.