Nadella: quickly backtracked.

AFP/Reuters/San Francisco

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella triggered uproar on Thursday after suggesting working women should trust “karma” when it comes to securing pay raises.

Nadella was speaking during an on-stage discussion at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Arizona, when he made the remarks.

Asked about advice for women interested in advancing careers but uncomfortable asking for pay increases, Nadella was quoted as responding they should just trust “that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along”.

He reportedly went on to contend that women who don’t ask for pay raises have a “superpower” in the form of “good karma, that’ll come back”.

Moderator Maria Klawe, a college president and a member of Microsoft’s board of directors, pointedly disagreed with Nadella, triggering applause from the audience.

Studies have consistently shown women get paid less than men doing the same jobs.

Klawe advised women listening to “do your homework” to make sure their pay is on par with that of male counterparts.

Nadella later scrambled to damp down the controversy in a response on Twitter.

“Was inarticulate re how women should ask for a raise,” Nadella said in a message fired off at his @satyanadella Twitter account. “Our industry must close gender pay gap so a raise is not needed because of a bias.”

Nadella also reportedly sent a memo to Microsoft employees apologising for suggesting women rely on good karma instead of asking for raises, saying his reply to the question earlier was “completely wrong”.

Yet Nadella touched a nerve at a time when Silicon Valley faces renewed scrutiny over the gender pay gap, and a lack of diversity in both the workforce and top management.

“The tech sector is still a non-traditional occupation for women,” said Ariane Hegewisch, study director at the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which monitors issues on women and employment. “There’s not a lot of evidence that karma has been friendly to women in this area.”

Research earlier this year by Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a California think tank, found that men in the region who hold graduate or professional degrees earn 73% more than women with the same educational qualifications. The gap was 40% for those with a bachelor’s degree.

An “Equal Pay Project” campaign launched this week calculated that American women over the course of their careers are paid $435,000 less than male counterparts, adding up to a staggering $29tn in aggregate.

In recent weeks, major tech firms have been looking at the issue with “diversity reports” that examine the composition of the workforce.

Microsoft reported earlier this month that its staff was only 29% women.

At Google, the figure was 30%. For Facebook, the percentage of women was 31%, but just 15% in technical jobs.

According to research from the National Centre for Women and Information Technology, citing census data, women obtained 18% of computer science degrees in 2012, down from 37% in 1985.

The report said women held 25% of jobs in the technology industry, down from 37% in 1990.

Some blame the male-dominated geek culture.

Researcher Catherine Ashcraft of the University of Colorado said that despite “a wealth of educational efforts to promote girls’ participation in computing”, there has been little increase in the number of women in the field.

She said these programmes often fall short because they “take a narrow view of their purpose, ignoring important factors that shape girls’ identities and education/career choices – not least broader narratives around gender, race, and sexuality”.

The tech sector has its share of well-known female CEOs – Marissa Mayer at Yahoo!, Meg Whitman at Hewlett-Packard, and co-CEO Safra Catz at Oracle – despite the small proportion in the industry overall.

Hegewisch said that the tech sector has become in some ways more difficult for women since the 1980s.

“The geek culture has gotten stronger and the work-all-night culture has gotten stronger, so this might be pushing women out,” Hegewisch told AFP.

She said women remain underrepresented in just about every segment of the tech industry, in contrast to some other fields like finance.

“Women might study math or science, but they might go into general business, because the working conditions and culture (in tech) are not that welcoming,” she said.

Nadella’s comments at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Arizona was particularly unfortunate.

But Hegewisch said that the fact that Nadella made the slip-up at a conference for women in computing suggests he lacks a grip on the issues.

“It shows he doesn’t really have a clue about the debate,” she said. “And it shows just how far we have to go.”