Author: chrism

Chris Martin was the Director of Research at PayScale. Chris hails from the great state of Utah and earned his MA in Economics at the University of Washington. He has two dogs (one of whom would really like to meet you), and prefers to spend his weeknights with food and friends and books and weekends in the mountains.

Data Visualizations

The Great Recession Pay Penalty

Searching for your first job during the Great Recession was a nightmare. But there is good news: your bad luck won’t haunt you forever.
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Data Visualizations

Average Americans Don’t See Average Wage Growth

This summer, news has broken that wage growth is up, down, and flat. What gives? The fact is that earnings are keeping pace with inflation for some groups, and falling behind for others - sometimes far, far behind.
Data Visualizations

Gender Inequity Three Ways: Means, Medians, and Modes

Last fall, Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams had to reshoot some scenes in All the Money In the World after Christopher Plummer replaced Kevin Spacey. We were shocked to learn that Wahlberg was paid $1.5 million for these reshoots, while Williams was paid less than $1,000. Stories like these put faces on...
Data Visualizations

Is There a Gender Pay Gap in Sports?

The gender pay gap crosses industries, so it is not a surprise that women in sports also get short-changed. Female athletes have publicized the issue of pay disparities for decades, but women behind the scenes also earn less. The battle for equal pay in sports started with the Women’s Tennis Association in...
Data Visualizations

Can You Quit Your Way to Higher Pay?

People who switch employers regularly don't necessarily earn more than employees who stick around.
Data Visualizations

The PayScale Methodology Explained

This post provides an overview of the PayScale dataset and the proprietary model we use to calculate expected pay. It also defines terms we commonly use in our research.   The PayScale Dataset The data we use for our research come from the PayScale online salary survey unless otherwise specified. This survey,...
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Articles

Salary History: Don’t Ask, Do Tell?

There are two approaches for making laws around salary history disclosures during a job interview: we can make it illegal for potential employers to ask for salary history, or we can make it illegal for them to use salary history when making pay decisions. PayScale recently surveyed over 15,000 job applicants regarding...
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Articles

A Decade of Data and a Stubborn Gender Pay Gap

The gender pay gap is one of the most important policy issues related to compensation. For the uninitiated, the gender pay gap refers to women systematically earning less than men. The issue is not only a problem of pay discrimination (employers paying women less money than men for the same job), but...

What Employers Legally Can and Can’t Ask You During a Job Interview and Salary Negotiation

“Where are you from?” It’s an easy conversation starter and suitable in most settings…except a job interview. So too, are other common social inquiries like, “Are you married,” “When did you graduate,” or “Have I seen you at my church?” A prospective employer who asks you these questions should send up a...
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Articles

Highly Educated Women Say Their Employers Aren’t Addressing Gender Inequity

Grad school provided me with a lot more insight into the problem of gender inequity than I bargained for. While I was pursuing a PhD in economics — a highly gender-imbalanced discipline, with women accounting for 12 percent of American economics professors and only one female Nobel prize recipient to date —...
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Case Studies

Babies, Bathwater, Data, and the Presidential Election

On election night, another data analyst and I sat at the tables on the first floor of PayScale’s offices in Seattle and watched the election results trickle in. We are data-oriented individuals, as you might expect given our job titles in a salary data driven software company. We had, like many of...
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Articles

2016 Nobel Prize in Economics: Contracts and Compensation

We spend a lot of time thinking about how much people get paid. That number is central to any job negotiation: potential employees want to make sure they can meet their financial needs and goals while potential employers want to attract and retain key talent while remaining under budget. There is another...