Silicon Valley women are still paid less than their male counterparts

Today, April 12, is Equal Pay Day.

It’s a day meant to draw attention to the gender wage gap in America, started by the National Committee on Pay Equity in 1996. According to the American Association of University Women, the key figure to know is that American women on average make 79 cents for every dollar a man earns. Latina women get 54 percent of what every white man makes; that figure is 63 percent for black women.

In Silicon Valley, this wage gap persists. According to data provided by Hired, a job recruiting startup, women are paid less than men for the same job at the same company 69 percent of the time. Additionally, Hired’s Equal Pay Day survey says that the average salary offer made to women is 3 percent less than what is offered to men.

One curious finding is that the gender wage gap isn’t nearly as pronounced among workers at early-stage companies. Bootstrapped (self-funded) and seed-stage startups have a 4 percent average gap; at companies that have raised a Series A round, the gap is 8 percent, and it is 7 percent for companies that have raised further funding. Hired offers two theories for this: When companies are small, there’s more salary transparency, which has been proven to close company wage gaps. The other has to do with base compensation versus the fluctuating value of equity held by employees.

A caveat to this particular data point is that this gap refers to salary disparities among software engineers. Those jobs are overwhelmingly held by men.

Hired says its data was drawn from “100,000 job offers across 15,000 candidates and 3,000 companies” on the company’s platform. There are charts from the report that more thoroughly flesh out the data. You can read the full survey here.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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