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Who are you? That’s the question we set out to answer every other year here at the IAPP with our biannual Salary and Governance Survey.

And we’re still searching. Our survey is still open, should you want to spend some time with it (you may get a certificate message – we’ve purchased a new one and updated, but it’s taking a while to process). We’ve had some great help from Ernst & Young in developing the question set, and it gets right at the very specific ways you operate your privacy teams.

However, we do have some early returns we want to share and even some data that is hard to ignore in relation to the public discourse around the Paycheck Fairness Act and reports like the recent piece from The New York Times that showed that there are more CEOs named John, even more CEOs named David, than there are CEOs who are women. In total.

But first, who are you?

Well, you’re equally likely to be a man as a woman (we’ll get back to that later). And you’re about 44 (regardless of your gender). You’ve been a privacy professional for about 8.2 years, and in your current job for just under five years.

This maps very closely to the Fortune 1000 data we collected last year, which is particularly reassuring, since the Fortune 1000 survey of CPOs only was filled out by 60 people, versus the more than 1,000 people we’re working with here.

In general, privacy professionals work at large companies. The average firm does about $1 billion in annual revenue, and is most likely to be in IT/telecommunications (26 percent), followed by 23 percent of pros working banking and financial, 14 percent in government and 11 percent in healthcare and pharma.

You’re a pretty well-educated bunch, as you might imagine. Just under 40 percent of you have a law degree, one in five has a Master’s. And, of course, 56 percent of you have a CIPP, 11 percent a CIPM and nine percent a CIPT.

And, finally, you make about $110k. Actually, $125k if you live in the U.S., $74k if you live in Canada and roughly $89k if you live in the EU. As you might expect, salaries increase fairly linearly as the size of the company increases.

But what about paycheck fairness? Let’s look at IAPP members who answered our survey. Surely, in a young industry, evenly split male-female, where everyone is the member of the same association, we should see pretty similar pay, no?

Well, not quite. Despite the fact that women are similarly educated (more law degrees, fewer MBAs), and slightly more likely to hold the title of CPO, they make, on average, just $107.5k, while men make $120.5k.

However, when you dial in to regions, the picture looks slightly better for equality. In the U.S., men make roughly $5k more annually, $130k to $125k. In the EU, women actually come out ahead, $100k to $94k. In Canada, however, the discrepancy is large: $87k for men, $70k for women, and in Canada women privacy pros outnumber men 65 percent to 35 percent.

What explains that? That’s not for this survey to say. But the data seems to indicate that, even in a privacy profession that’s evenly divided by gender, there is still some work to be done on equality.

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