Gender gap persists in marketing technology roles, salary survey finds

SAN JOSE, CA –The salary gap between women and men working in marketing technology-related roles has shown no sign of closing, according to our 2019 Marketing Technology and Operations Salary Survey. The second-annual survey was conducted in conjunction with Chiefmartec.com and released Thursday at the MarTech Conference.

The salary gap kicks in around a base salary of $125,000. There’s also evidence of a gender gap in job levels and promotion rates as careers progress. Nearly double the number of women as men reported it’s been more than five years since their last promotion. Two consecutive years of data show little to no progress in these areas.

Marketing technologist role waning? The report is an analysis of responses from participants in three core martech disciplines: Marketing Technology/Marketing IT/Marketing Technologist (30.4%), Marketing Operations (24.4%) and Marketing Operations and Technology combined (45.2%).

Compared to last year, fewer respondents identified as being marketing technology/IT roles, while more identified as being in marketing operations and combined operations and technology roles.

“I’ve seen this at a number of companies, where ‘marketing operations’ has generally become an umbrella function in the marketing department for all its centralized technology and data services,” said Scott Brinker, who shared the results during the MarTech Conference keynote Thursday morning. Brinker heads Chiefmartec.com and chairs the conference. “There are still pure marketing technology specialists. But increasingly, marketing technologists are part of the marketing operations team.”

Coming from business and liberal arts backgrounds. Given their roles, one would assume that the respondents have technology education backgrounds. Yet just 5.8% of respondents have an undergraduate degree in computer science or IT and just 6.6% have an engineering or science degree. Nearly one-third (32.1%) instead have degrees in business or economics and 29.3% have liberal arts degrees.

This finding highlights the fact that these roles, in fact, largely encompass business and marketing functions, not IT functions.

Base salaries shifted a bit lower with 54.3% reporting a base salary under $100,000, compared to 51.6% in 2018.

The full report is available for download (free with registration).