The gender pay gap in the South African technology sector continues to widen as it increased to 13.2%, up from 6.4% last year among entry-level developers and widened from 16.3% to 25.7% at senior level, according to the 2023 State of the South Africa Software Developer Nation report released this week.
This data report on developer career trends in South Africa, and the fourth annual report of its kind released by OfferZen. It is based on a survey of over 4 500 developers.
OfferZen’s CEO and co-founder, Phil Joubert, encouraged HR and People team leads to consider the nuance behind the data.
“It’s easy to reduce the data to a headline, but there are multiple factors at play here. This includes the fact that male developers start coding earlier than women developers. Women, regardless of their profession, also continue to shoulder most of the child-rearing responsibilities, often taking time out from their careers,” Joubert said.
In 2019, OfferZen’s annual report found that more than 50% of male developers started coding before the age of 18, compared to only 33% of women. OfferZen data found that developers who started coding earlier in life earned higher starting salaries and, as a result, earned more throughout their careers.
“Discrimination is real, but only one factor in the growing gender pay gap in tech. Globally, the trend is moving in a positive direction, but there’s still much to be done. Local companies should reflect on their compensation and ensure that women in tech are being fairly compensated. Reducing the gender pay gap inside companies will help retain high-quality tech talent in a competitive hiring market,” Joubert said.
The good news for South African software developers was that their salaries had increased, despite the global slowdown in tech. Junior developers saw the biggest increase in 2022 at 19.4% compared to 2021. Senior developers had also seen increases of an average of 6.2%, but year-on-year salary growth halved compared to 2022.
While developer salaries continued to increase, higher-than-average inflation was eating into real salary growth. When adjusted for inflation, entry-level developers were the best off, with real earning growth at about 11%, while the salaries of developers with more experience grew by less than 2%.
Cape Town retains the top spot for developer salaries in 2022, with Johannesburg, Durban, and Pretoria catching up at the more senior levels. Gauteng-based developers with more than ten years of experience were separated by less than a 2% difference in salary when compared to Cape Town-based developers.
Joubert said with more than half of South African developers working at fully-remote companies, they expected the salary difference between cities to decrease even further in the coming years.
Fully office-based policies were still the exception, with less than 8% of developers having to go into the office every day, the report found.
The tech hiring spree that kicked off in 2021 slowed down significantly in 2022, with tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta laying off thousands of employees. South African companies managed to mostly avoid layoffs in 2022, as less than 3% of South African developers were retrenched last year.
He said there there were still many strong local job opportunities.
However, as the local market started to absorb the impact of a highly volatile global tech climate-combined with a tough macroeconomic outlook for South Africa, 2023 looked set to be a challenging year for tech recruiters looking to hire the best software developers.
Meanwhile, Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange, said it was renewing its commitment to increase the number of women active and employed in Web3. Through women-focused education and mentorship initiatives, it said it has, to date, invested more than $2 million (R36m) to support women in more than 10 countries (including South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria) and would increase those efforts in the year ahead.
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