Austin has climbed into the top 10 nationally for women working in tech, landing at No. 6 among the 50 biggest U.S. cities in a new study measuring where female tech workers earn the most relative to their male peers and make up the largest share of the industry. More than 12,000 women now work in tech roles across the city, representing nearly 23 percent of Austin's total tech workforce, even though tech workers overall make up less than 9 percent of the city's total workforce.
The ranking comes from CultureMap Austin, reporting on a new analysis released by financial technology company SmartAsset that compared the 50 biggest U.S. cities on measures including the gender pay gap, women's share of tech workers, tech-worker employment concentration, and adjusted median earnings. For the study's purposes, tech workers are defined as city residents employed in computer and mathematical occupations. Women tech workers in Austin earn about $99,500 in median earnings once adjusted for regional price parity, the outlet reports — but that figure amounts to just 80 percent of what male tech workers in the city take home.
How Austin Stacks Up Against the Rest of the Country
Austin's pay gap is notably wider than in some of the cities ranked just behind it nationally. In Miami, women tech workers earn adjusted median earnings of $88,650, which actually comes out to 101.7 percent of male tech workers' earnings in that city, per the same CultureMap Austin report. Memphis women tech workers showed a similar pattern, earning adjusted median earnings of $84,718, or 101.5 percent of what men earn there — meaning two cities with lower median earnings than Austin still managed pay parity or better for women.
San Jose topped the overall rankings, a result that lines up with separate SmartAsset findings showing San Jose leads the nation in tech-job concentration, with over 10 percent of its workers employed in the industry, according to SmartAsset. Women tech workers there earn an unadjusted median income of $167,223, or about $143,918 once adjusted for price parity, yet even in the nation's top-ranked tech hub, women still earn only 80.5 percent of what men make. Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Baltimore rounded out the top five ahead of Austin, with Oakland, Portland, Boston, and Minneapolis following behind it to close out the top 10.
Other Texas Cities Trail Far Behind
No other Texas city came close to Austin's standing. Houston ranked 15th nationally, Fort Worth came in at 26th, Dallas landed at 32nd, Arlington sat at 38th, San Antonio placed 42nd, and El Paso ranked 49th among the 50 cities studied, according to the CultureMap Austin report. The gap between Austin and the rest of the state underscores just how uneven opportunities for women in tech remain even within a single state, let alone across the country.
SmartAsset's report also found that Bakersfield, California recorded the largest pay disparity among all 50 cities studied, with women in tech there earning just 65.5 percent as much as their male counterparts. On the other end of the spectrum, Detroit led all 50 cities for the highest proportion of female tech workers, where women make up 39.7 percent of the total tech workforce, SmartAsset found.
A Multi-Year Climb From Near the Bottom
Austin's current standing marks a dramatic reversal from where the city sat just seven years earlier. In a 2019 SmartAsset study, Austin ranked 44th out of 58 U.S. cities for women in tech, according to CultureMap Austin's earlier coverage — making its jump to sixth place in 2026 a substantial multi-year climb. Local resources have grown alongside that shift: in May 2023, the global WomenTech Network launched a dedicated Austin chapter in partnership with local tech startup Howdy to expand mentorship, career networking, and diversity hiring initiatives in the city.
Still, the gains in Austin and nationally come against a backdrop of broader stagnation. A September 2024 report by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showed that women made up 22.6 percent of the U.S. high-tech workforce in 2022, a figure that remained virtually unchanged from 2005 levels.
National Pipeline Still Lags Behind Local Progress
Bureau of Labor Statistics data for 2025 indicated that women held 27.5 percent of computer and mathematical jobs nationwide, earning a median weekly salary of $1,828 compared to $2,138 for men. The pipeline feeding those jobs shows similar limits: women earned just 25.1 percent of computer science bachelor's degrees conferred at responding U.S. and Canadian university computing departments during the 2024–2025 academic year, according to the CRA Taulbee Survey.
A 2026 global review of studies compiled by Harvard Business School pointed to a newer concern — an emerging gender gap in artificial intelligence tool adoption, with 39.3 percent of women using generative AI compared to 47.8 percent of men. As the report's author put it, opportunities for women in tech can vary considerably by location, and these differences shape access to jobs, career advancement and earning potential. Austin's climb up the national rankings suggests local progress is possible, even as the city's own 20 percent pay gap and the nation's stalled gender pipeline show how far the industry still has to go.
