Engineer salary survey highlights widening gender pay gap

Produced in partnership with technical recruitment consultancy CBSbutler, the survey – now in its fourth year – attracted responses from 2,864 engineers from across the UK.

Female engineers, who accounted for just 7.2 per cent of respondents, are paid on average £35,800. This compares to an average of £48,720 for their male colleagues and marks a widening of the £10,000 pay gap identified by our 2017 salary survey.

This gap can be partly explained by the difference in seniority among male and female respondents.  For instance, just 2.4 per cent and 11.3 per cent of male respondents describe themselves as graduates and junior engineers respectively, compared with 10.2 per cent and 20.3 per cent of female respondents.

However, the findings do suggest that male engineers at all levels of seniority are paid more than their female counterparts. Female graduates and junior engineers earn an average of £27,552, for example, compared with £31,051 for male engineers, a gap of around £3,500. This gap jumps to around £10,000 for senior engineers and managers, and widens even further at director level and above, where women earn £46,053, and men £73,595, a huge difference of £27,542.