Study: Women in Indy tech jobs earn more than males

Female technology workers in Indianapolis earn slightly more than their male counterparts, according to a new study, and Indy is only one of three cities nationally where that's happening.

A study by financial tech firm SmartAsset released this week called "The Best Cities for Women in Tech" found that in 2014, women working in "computer or mathematical occupations" locally made 100.8 percent of what men in those jobs made.

Kansas City, Missouri, had a slightly better ratio, and Detroit led the pack—its female tech workers made $122.80 for every $100 its male tech workers earned. The national average for the cities SmartAsset surveyed was 86.7 percent.

"There is a significant positive correlation between tech industry representation for women and pay equity in the 58 cities SmartAsset analyzed," the company said in a blog post detailing the findings. "While it is impossible to say what exactly causes this relationship, it is clear that some cities have a better overall culture for women in technology."

SmartAsset based its analysis on U.S. Census Bureau data, which fuses mathematical jobs and computing—or tech—jobs into one category. Smart Asset noted that computing jobs account for about 94 percent of all the jobs in the category.

Pay equity was just one of the metrics SmartAsset used in calculating the best cities for female techies. It also looked at income and the percentage of tech job filled by women. Washington, D.C., ranked first with a 91.8 rating out of 100; Indianapolis ranked fifth with a 71.93 rating.

Here's how Indy stacked up across the four metrics:

• Gender pay gap – No. 3 – The median pay for women ($60,181) was 100.78 percent higher than that of men ($59,713).
   
• Income after housing cost – No. 22 – Women in the field kept about $50,161, after subtracting the median annual housing cost.
   
• Tech jobs filled by women – No. 12 – Women occupied 29.4 percent of tech jobs in Indianapolis.
   
• Three-year tech employment growth – No. 45 – Between 2011 and 2014, the number of tech jobs for both sexes only grew by 7 percent.

  See graphic below