The Gender Pay Gap among Indian Software Developers

Abstract

In this paper, we attempt to study the gender pay gap in the case of Indian software developers. This is the only study in our knowledge that analyses gender pay gap in this important and dynamic sector in India. Previous studies on wage gap suffer from the problem of bias due to differences in the supports of the empirical distributions of individual characteristics for females and males. Lack of common support also leads to considerable model dependence of results. We overcome the limitations of previous gender wage gap studies by using entropy balancing weights in our re-centered influence function-based wage decompositions. We find the existence of a gender pay gap after controlling for other covariates. We also find the presence of glass ceiling phenomenon for software developers in India.

Keywords: Gender Pay Gap Indian Software Developers, Glass Ceiling, Entropy Balancing, Re-Centered Influence Function Regression