4th June 2026

The gender pay gap in tech: how do we close it?

Gender pay gap

Every year, UK companies with 250 or more employees are legally required to publish their gender pay gap data. Defined simply, the gender pay gap is the percentage difference between the average gross hourly earnings of men and women across an entire organisation.

While the UK’s national median gender pay gap has steadily improved, falling to 6.9%, the technology sector is moving in the wrong direction. Recent data shows that the median gender pay gap for UK IT professionals has widened sharply to 17.6%, marking a nine-year high.

Despite decades of awareness, the “frustratingly slow” progress has officially reversed. If we want to turn the tide, we have to understand exactly why this gap is expanding and take intentional, modern steps to dismantle it.

Important Clarification: The gender pay gap is not the same as unequal pay. Paying a woman less than a man for the exact same job has been illegal since the Equal Pay Act of 1970. Instead, the tech pay gap exists because men heavily dominate the highest-paying technical and executive roles, while women are disproportionately concentrated in entry-level, non-technical, or administrative positions.

Why is the tech pay gap widening?

The widening of the gap is largely a result of structural changes in the industry over the last few years:

  • The AI and Hyper-Specialism Boom: Since 2022, salaries have skyrocketed in bleeding-edge subsectors like Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, cloud architecture, and cybersecurity. Because the talent pipeline for these technical roles heavily skews male, men have captured the bulk of these high-paying positions, pulling the male median salary up at an accelerated rate.
  • The Executive “Glass Ceiling”: While entry-level hiring has become slightly more balanced, leadership remains heavily monolithic. Women still hold a tiny minority of tech director and C-suite roles in the UK.
  • The Early Pipeline Failure: The issue starts long before the interview stage. Women account for only about 16% of the UK’s current generation of engineering and technology undergraduates.

The strategic framework to close the gap

We cannot fix a structural problem with superficial fixes. Closing the 17.6% gap requires tech companies to target three key levers: recruitment, internal progression, and retention.

1. Re-engineer technical recruitment
 If your pipeline is exclusively male, your output will be too.

  • De-bias job descriptions: Use augmented writing tools to strip masculine-coded language (“rockstar,” “aggressive,” “dominant”) out of software engineering postings.
  • Enforce diverse shortlists: Commit to interviewing a diverse slate of candidates for every senior technical role. If a headhunter claims they “can’t find any women in AI,” push back or change recruiters.
  • Skill-based, blind grading: Use anonymised coding tests and standardised interviewing rubrics to evaluate technical capabilities purely on merit.

2. Democratise progression and upskilling
 The gap exists because women get stuck in mid-level individual contributor (IC) roles or non-technical paths.

  • Targeted technical upskilling: Provide internal pathways, bootcamps, and stipends for women in junior or adjacent roles (like QA, project management, or support) to transition into high-paying tracks like Data Engineering, Cloud Architecture, or DevOps.
  • Formalised sponsorship: Mentorship is nice, but sponsorship changes careers. Pair rising female talent with senior executives who have the institutional capital to advocate for them behind closed doors when promotions are decided.

3. Protect and evolve flexible working
 The post-pandemic push to force workers back into central offices full-time is disproportionately harming women, who still bear an unequal share of domestic and caregiving responsibilities.

  • Asynchronous-first cultures: Evaluate employees on output, not visibility or “desk time”.
  • Normalise shared parental leave: The “motherhood penalty” erodes women’s pay trajectories in their 30s and 40s. Culturally normalising extended parental leave for men helps level the playing field at home and at work.

Accountability: Shifting from compliance to action

Mandatory reporting was designed to spark self-reflection, but transparency without action is just public relations. Tech companies must treat their gender pay gap metrics with the exact same rigour they apply to their quarterly revenue targets.

Until tech leaders look at a 17.6% pay disparity as a critical operational failure, rather than an inevitable industry quirk, the gap will continue to grow. True progress will only be achieved when we actively build an industry where women aren’t just invited into the room, but are systematically supported, promoted, and paid to lead it.

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