Analysis

March 8, 2021

Women vs. men: Salary expectations at startups

Otta finds that women almost always say they’d take a smaller salary than men. Luckily, employers don’t give them it.


Amy Lewin

1 min read

Some good news, and some bad. 

London-based startup jobs company Otta looked into how salary expectations compare between women and men who sign up to its platform. 

On average, women say that they would accept a lower salary for a role than men with the same amount of relevant professional experience.

For data engineering roles, women with three to four years of experience on average say £42.3k is the lowest salary they’d take. Men with the same experience say it’d be £46.7k. In recruitment roles, women would accept £33.9k, men £36.2k. 

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Otta found just three roles where the reverse was true: frontend engineer; sales and solutions engineer; and mobile engineer. 

The good news, though, is that Otta finds that when candidates are actually offered jobs by startups, there are no “significant differences” in the salaries offered.

Happy International Women’s Day! 

The data

Amy Lewin

Amy Lewin is Sifted’s editor and cohost of Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast , and writes Up Round, a weekly newsletter on VC. Follow her on X and LinkedIn