Salary is a funny thing. Most people would rather focus on their work than spend time thinking about how what they earn compares to what their colleagues and peers earn. But whether you think about your salary every time your paycheck arrives or just once a year when your review rolls around, it’s something you can’t ignore entirely.
That’s why Genome Technology brings you its exclusive annual salary survey, now in its fifth year. We polled readers to find out all the gory details of your compensation packages so we can help you understand how comfortable you should be with what you make. Thanks to the 1,796 readers who filled out the survey, we can bring you this fresh look at how the field is doing in terms of salary, grant funding, raises, and more.
This year, we’ve broken out some of the data in new ways. We split up the earnings brackets — particularly those between $50,000 and $150,000 — adding more and smaller ranges to provide extra granularity in salary data for the majority of our respondents. We also tried to make our main chart, salary by title and organization type, easier to use. You can now find your own title and then compare at a glance how your salary range compares to that of your peers in different types of institutions.
Another new way to parse the data: we sorted by salary ranges, and then sliced and diced that information to find the most common characteristics of those groups. For instance, if your salary falls between $50,000 and $59,999, you’re most likely to be a staff scientist performing PCR or PCR-related tasks in a university setting. If you’re earning $100,000 to $109,999, you’re probably a senior scientist at a pharma or biotech, where you’re most likely to be working on microarray analysis or gene expression.
You can also compare salary by region. To make that useful, we focus on three of our biggest respondent groups — professor or PI; senior scientist, senior researcher, or senior technologist; and staff scientist, researcher, or programmer — and map out median salaries for each of those groups around the world.
As always, we begin with the demographics of our respondents so you know exactly what kind of people participated in the survey. That information is broken down into the same questions you ask of each other when you first meet: What’s your educational and scientific background? How long have you been in research? Where do you work, and what’s your title?
For all this information and plenty more, click here for the PDF version of the article.