UX Writing Gender Insights –

A few weeks back, we published our annual Writers in Tech Salary Survey Report where we explored research findings about UX writing and related professions. 

We looked at data on global average income, compensation by age and experience, education levels, and more. 

But our survey collected a lot more data than that!

We asked the community what other insights would interest them, and the first reply was for more info on gender. So in this article, we’ll dig deeper into the data and uncover a few more gender-focused insights.

In the original report, we presented two major insights about gender:

1. Women dominate the field of writers in tech by a 3:1 ratio—close to 75% of respondents were women.
2. Average and median global salaries for men and women were very close.

These insights showed us that writers in tech are helping close the gender wage gap, which is great! But if we dig a little deeper into the data, we see that there are still some differences between the sexes.

Note: most of the results in this report focus on men and women. This is because the various non-binary respondents were less than one percent making it difficult to find statistically significant results in most cases.

UX writing wage gap by country

As we said, on average, men and women around the world earn similar salaries as writers in tech. But we wondered, “are there any individual countries with significant differences?” Turns out that there are.

Figures are for full-time salaried employees and are in USD.

Of the countries with a significant gap and enough responses for each gender, only in the U.K. did women report earning more than men. 

We should note, though, that for a few of these countries, the sample size is small, so our results may not be as accurate in those cases. When we look at countries with larger numbers of respondents, like the US and Canada, or at the entire global set of responses, we see only a small gap between genders.

UX writing freelance rates by gender

Looking at freelance rates, we see a sharper distinction between men and women at the global level.

Globally, on average, men are charging $12 more per hour than women, which is 22% more. Among countries with enough respondents to get meaningful data, Canada, France, Poland, and Spain had similar hourly freelance rates among men and women. But some countries had significant differences:

At first glance, it seems that women, in most countries, aren’t charging as much as men on freelance projects.

Again though, the picture isn’t as clear as it first seems to be. 

When I dug a bit deeper, I saw that the average freelance rate for men was being skewed by a few very high outlier responses. If we removed those, the average hourly rate for men and women would be much closer.

India is an interesting case in that women are charging significantly more than men. I double-checked the data (examined each row), and it seems accurate. It’s also surprising since, when we looked at full-time positions, Indian men earned more. So if anyone has a guess as to why Indian women are charging more than Indian men but earning less in full-time positions, we’d all love to hear.

The takeaway from this data should be that, whoever you are, whatever gender, and in whichever country, make sure you’re charging your clients the rate you deserve. Don’t be shy—you’re worth it!

Education, experience, and seniority

Among education levels, men and women were back on equal footing, with similar results for each level of education. 

A larger percentage of women have master’s degrees, while more men didn’t finish college. But, as we saw in our initial report, these education levels don’t match up with salaries the way we would expect.