Over the past few decades, there has been a high demand for pay transparency in the workplace.
This is due to revelations of major discrepancies between different factions in the workplace; either white people are being paid more than people of color, or men take home more money for the same job undertaken by women.
Naturally, this is lack of inclusivity is appalling and has forced companies the world over to re-evaluate what they’re paying employees through conducting regular pay reviews.
When it comes to the customer success business function, are all people from all walks of life compensated fairly based on their ethnicity, gender, sexuality and/or disability?
Constantly curious, we delved into this question in our Customer Success Salary Survey 2022 report.
Pay and gender
We discovered that the majority of our survey respondents identified as female (59.6%), with the average salary for a woman clocking in at $85,645 before tax. Comparatively, male CS practitioners made, on average, $90,475 before tax. There is a clear difference of $4,830 between our male and female salaries.
Even though men were outnumbered in the participant stakes, their total annual compensation surpassed that of their female counterparts by $8,233, as well as taking home $3,082 more in bonuses.
Gender salaries by region
We’ve established that customer success salaries vary by region, and we wanted to gain an understanding of how men's and women’s pay varies in different parts of the globe.
We discovered that men’s average baseline salary is consistently higher than women’s everywhere in the world, bar Asia.
Our results showed men earn more than women in Australasia, but the difference was extremely marginal, with a difference of $867 between the two genders.
Job titles and gender
We compared the baseline salaries of men and women in a variety of roles, irrespective of the location, in an attempt to reveal any significant difference in earning potential between men and women, even if they share the same job title:
When we assessed the earnings of men and women occupying senior positions, i.e. Director of Customer Success and VP of Customer Success, there was no consistent trend suggesting that one gender was benefiting over another; for senior positions like VP and Director, women appeared to earn more, on average than men, but men earned more money in CSM, Sr. CSM, Manager, and Heads of Customer Success positions.
Are certain CS positions dominated by one gender?
We broke down the list of respondents and checked out how many men and women occupied each position.
We found that more women occupy CS roles than their male counterparts at each stage of the career cycle, except for Directors of Customer Success, where 66.7% of VPs are men, and 33.3% are women.
Pay and ethnic minorities
We wanted to understand how many of our survey participants considered themselves to be a part of an ethnic minority in their workplace, and how this was if at all, reflected in their paycheck.
Out of all our respondents, a small percentage of CS professionals identified as part of an ethnic minority (21%). Most of our participants did not identify as an ethnic minority (79%).
Out of all those who identified as an ethnic minority in place of work, the majority of those participants hailed from North America (69.2%). We found that Europe was the second-most prevalent region with a smaller percentage of people who identified as an ethnic minority, at  21.2%.
Wanting to take this appraisal further, we wanted to break down salaries further and see what those who identified as an ethnic minority make in their workplace.
As it turns out, there is not much difference ($999) in baseline salaries between those who identify as a minority in their workplace and those in the ethnic majority, at least among our respondents.
Pay and the LGBT+ community,
Unfortunately, where there is a power imbalance, you will find bigotry; where there is bigotry, discrimination is sure to follow swiftly behind.
There’s been a well-overdue discourse in recent years on the topic of the wage gap between men and women, white people and people of color, and/or ethnic minorities. The Franklin & Marshall Global Barometer of Gay Rights gave 62% of countries a failing grade on legal and social protections afforded to LGBT+ people in 2018.
Therefore, it’s only wise to consider a discriminatory correlation between members of the LGBT+ community versus the heterosexual and cisgender community.
We wanted to understand if, and how, societal prejudice affects the wages of those in the LGBT community and, specifically, if this discriminatory financial canyon manifests itself within the customer success function.
Only 13% of our survey respondents identified themselves as part of the LGBT+ community, with the average baseline salary working out at $90,422, before tax; this is only minorly lower than the average baseline CS salary of all participants, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification at $91,575, before tax.
Pay and disability
A mere 8% of our survey respondents reported having a disability, either invisible or physical. Sadly, this isn’t a shock that disabled representation is so low when you consider research undertaken by the Harvard Business Review, which states that over one-third of disabled people have experienced negative bias in their jobs.
In the US alone, the unemployment rate is twice as high for people with disabilities as for the rest of the general population. Around 15% of the world’s population experience some kind of disability, but we can’t even begin to gauge how many of those people work in CS when the data is critically underreported, or simply not collected at all.
On average, those who reported a disability take home a baseline salary of $100,999, before tax – well above the global average.
Pay and higher education
While not one of the more prominent aspects of DE&I – like race, gender, disabilities, and sexuality – education does play an enormous role in sculpting a person. Whether a person is academic or not, education is widely considered to be an important avenue for opening up opportunities.
Traditionally – and depending on the role and industry – having a degree on your resumé is seen as necessary. For some, higher education may not have been possible or accessible. Even though 91% of our survey respondents are college-educated, having a degree isn’t a prerequisite for the customer success industry.
A non-college-educated CS practitioner has an average baseline salary of $80,000, before tax. Those with a diploma in an undisclosed field receive, on average, around $62,248. For those whose highest degree is a Bachelor’s, the average salary is $92,224; for a Master’s it works out at a slightly lower, $86,685, and for those with a Doctorate, an even lower, $65,784.
Our results show that people with a Bachelor’s degree tend to have the highest-paid jobs, before tax. Interestingly, the people with the highest level of education, a doctorate, are the lowest paid out of these categories. People without a college degree are paid nearly $15,000 per annum more than those with a Ph.D. That being said, it’s important to note how different regions will factor into this.
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