Are you underpaid? Glassdoor lets you see how your salary compares to your co-workers'

A new online tool can tell you if you're being shortchanged because of the gender pay gap or other inequities

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published October 19, 2016 9:02PM (EDT)

  (<a href='http://www.shutterstock.com/gallery-52959p1.html'>Piotr Marcinski</a> via <a href='http://www.shutterstock.com/'>Shutterstock</a>)
(Piotr Marcinski via Shutterstock)

Think you’re underpaid? Glassdoor has developed a new tool to help determine whether suspicions are justified.

Glassdoor's lets you input your employer's name and location, job title, years of relevant experience and current salary. After a quick calculation, it then tells you how much you ought to be paid. Currently, this feature covers 55 to 60 percent of the American workforce.

This online tool follows on the heels of a study on the gender pay gap commissioned by Glassdoor earlier this year, which found that women are on average paid 76 cents for every dollar earned by men.

While critics of the idea of a gender pay gap claim that it’s a result of the choices women make — mainly leaving the workforce to raise children — this ignores the fact that women who do this are often pressured by their employers or society’s broader patriarchal culture.

Industries with the highest gender-pay gap include health care (7.2 percent), insurance (7.2 percent), transportation and logistics (6.8 percent), media (6.6 percent) and the arts, entertainment and recreation field (6.6 percent). Within the tech industries the largest gaps occur among computer programmers (28.3 percent), computer-aided designers (21.5 percent), and video game artists (15.8 percent). Overall, the gender-pay gap costs women $500 billion each year.

Glassdoor's site isn’t the first to let users to determine how much they should get paid based on what they do. Comparably performs the same function by allowing visitors to input whether they work in technology or another industry, their department, job title and zip code. Similar information can be found on sites like Payscale.com, Indeed.com, Salary.com and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But Glassdoor utilizes company-specific pay-scale information to help you seek salary equality.


By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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