7 high-paying tech roles where women thrive

Women remain severely underrepresented in IT, but there are some roles where women do dominate.

“I didn’t realize how many women filled these roles until I dove into the data,” says Stephanie Wernick, vice president of sales at IT recruiting and staffing firm Mondo. “And at the risk of pigeonholing and stereotyping, I believe it’s because of how women are socialized from our earliest days to focus on those ‘fluffy’ and ‘creative’ and ‘soft’ careers rather than the harder technical areas.”

That means women are primed to enter careers in marketing, communications and graphic design, as well as organizational, detail-oriented roles like business analyst and project management based on their perceived innate strengths.

“Not to say that women don’t have these skills or that they shouldn’t pursue the careers that they’re passionate about, but the belief that women aren’t suited for hard tech, engineering and other careers is just wrong,” she says, and there are many reasons why they’re leaving these fields in droves.

Where women do dominate in tech — in areas like marketing, graphic design and UI/UX design — they excel, and often pull down extremely competitive salaries. Here, based on data from Mondo’s data on available roles filled by women, are the highest-paid roles for women in tech, along with the salary ranges for each job.

Salary range: $90,000-$150,000

Digital marketing managers develop and manage all aspects of an organization’s digital marketing strategy, including social media. They are masters of paid search, SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) techniques to drive effective campaigns. Salary can range from $90,000 to $150,000 depending on experience, geographic market and other factors.

“That’s a pretty big range, but it also varies based on the size of the company,” says Wernick. “For small companies, not only are their budgets not as big, but in this role you’re just managing the marketing activities and not people. In larger companies, you might be managing a number of direct reports as well as all their activities, so it’s going to be a different scenario,” she says.

Salary range: $65,000-$95,000

Business analysts define, analyze and document requirements that are needed to develop technical solutions to a company’s business problems. “For a junior-level BA, salary is around $65,000, but for more experienced talent, that can be as high as $95,000,” Wernick says.

Salary range: $40,000-$60,000

Graphic designers create visual concepts — either by hand or using software — to communicate ideas to viewers, whether they’re colleagues or customers. They work closely with content creators and the marketing department, and command salaries of $40,000 to $60,000, according to Mondo.

Salary range: $90,000-$130,000

An art director works with concepts and ideas to create visual representations of those concepts that best convey an organization’s message, mission and values. They’re responsible for delivering visual aspects of an effective marketing, sales or ad campaign and managing teams of graphic designers, too, says Wernick. They also work with photographers and other creative workers, and command salaries of $90,000 to as high as $130,000, depending on the company and geographic market.

Salary range: $100,000-$120,000

Managing the extensive number of business-critical IT projects and prudently allocating resources is extremely important to an organization’s success, and many of these roles are filled by women. “Obviously there’s a bit of gender profiling and stereotypes here, but women are socialized to be very good at management, communication and collaboration skills, understanding requirements and seeing things from different viewpoints, and these are all skills needed for a great project manager,” Wernick says.

Salary range: $90,000-$130,000

User experience is a major focus for technology organizations, as it can make or break a user or customer’s satisfaction with your products and services. It’s also key to attracting and retaining millennial and Generation Z customers, who’ve grown up as digital natives and want every experience to be intuitive, simple and seamless, Wernick says. While the salary range for this role is already more than respectable, in some markets, very senior talent in these roles can command salaries of up to $150,000, says Wernick.

Salary range: $130,000 – $200,000

Eloqua is a marketing automation software platform. The available talent pool with the skills and experience to successfully leverage this technology — as well as similar software platforms like Marketo — is very small, which means salaries are really competitive, says Wernick. “I believe this is an outgrowth of women dominating marketing and communications overall, and then adding these software skills; they now have evolved to be very competitive in the technology space,” she says.