DataX Connect Adds Gender Questions to Its Salary Survey

DataX Connect, a recruiter specialising in the data centre sector, has added gender questions to its salary survey, the company announced in a move reported by DataCentreNews UK.

The change means respondents to the survey will now be asked to disclose gender alongside their pay information. For a sector that has long faced questions over diversity in its workforce, the addition turns a routine compensation benchmark into a potential instrument for measuring gender pay disparity.

What does the new question actually change?

Until now, the DataX Connect salary survey collected compensation data without a gender breakdown. Anyone using the results — candidates negotiating offers, employers calibrating pay bands, hiring managers benchmarking roles — could see what data centre professionals earned, but not whether men and women in comparable positions earned differently.

With gender data attached, the survey can in principle support:

• Gender-disaggregated salary benchmarks by role and region
• Identification of pay gaps within specific job functions
• Year-over-year tracking of whether those gaps narrow or widen

That shift matters for individuals as much as for HR departments. A candidate entering salary negotiations armed with gender-split benchmarks holds a materially stronger negotiating position than one working from blended averages that may conceal a gap.

Why this matters for the data centre labour market

The data centre industry has expanded rapidly as demand for digital infrastructure has grown, and compensation in the sector has risen accordingly. But sector-level salary surveys only deliver full value when they capture who is earning what. Without demographic segmentation, headline averages can look healthy even where structural pay differences persist between groups doing equivalent work.

For employers, gender-split survey data also carries compliance relevance. UK organisations with 250 or more employees must report gender pay gap figures, and third-party benchmarking data of this kind provides an external reference point against internal numbers.

What comes next

The value of the addition will depend on response volume and disclosure rates: gender-split benchmarks are only as reliable as the sample behind them. If participation holds up, future editions of the DataX Connect survey should allow data centre professionals and employers to see, for the first time in this dataset, whether pay in the sector is genuinely converging across genders.