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.

READ THE FULL 2018 SALARY SURVEY HERE

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.

More generally, this year’s survey tells a story of stagnation, with many key measures showing little, if any change, from last year’s results.

And although there are significant regional, sectoral and seniority based variations, the mean average salary for engineers taking part in this year’s survey is £47,896, which marks a slight decrease on last year’s average of £48,197. To put this in perspective, our 2017 survey showed a year on year average salary increase of six per cent.

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With industry facing a period of growing uncertainty, this stagnation is perhaps unsurprising. And Brexit is clearly looming large in the thoughts of many UK engineers. 61 per cent of those surveyed are concerned about the impact of Brexit on industry, whilst 37 per cent say they are worried about the impact that leaving the EU would have on their job security.

Despite such concerns though, UK engineers appear to be a fairly settled bunch, and although just 32.7 percent of the total response group are content with their pay more than half say that they are happy in their current roles, and more than 80 per cent expect to stay in industry for at least the next five years.

We will be analysing the findings of this year's survey in greater detail over the coming weeks and months.

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