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I remember being a kid and learning how much Michael Jordan made playing basketball. I didn’t think anyone was worth that much money. At one point, I think he was making more than $300,000 a game. Good work if you can get it. I also remember listening to a talk-radio host explain Jordan’s salary. He basically said Jordan was paid fairly because of the value he brought to the team. That team, the Chicago Bulls, was worth more than $329 million according to Forbes. Before Jordan, it was worth significantly less.

When you’re an athlete, you get paid for the value you bring to the team by your individual efforts and team contributions. When you do great, you get paid great. When you win big, you get big bonuses. When you work hard and play hard all season, you can almost always count on coming back. The reverse is true as well; negativity toward the team or coach, or a bad year that doesn’t look to get any better, and you get cut from the roster.

What if it worked this way in the workplace? What if everyone got paid for the value they brought to the team? For some companies, it would be a welcomed change. For others, it would scare the employees to death to be evaluated that way, much less paid that way. The down side, of course, is that the pay scale would be biased and the way people would be rated could be highly subjective.

Corporate America has come up with its own way of measuring and rating people that’s supposed to be unbiased and fair. I hope in your workplace that’s the case.

However, in a recent salary study done by Dice.com, the results were troublesome. According to the study, in the technology field men are making more money than women – about 12 percent more last year. That’s a significant increase from 2006, when the difference was 9.7 percent.

The survey reported that salaries for men increased 2.4 percent in 2007, but remained flat for women. The average salary last year for men was $76,582, and for women $67,507.

That 12 percent gap is a big differential, and depending on the position, we could be talking about thousands of dollars.

I was surprised by these results. Technology has always seemed to pride itself on its parity in pay and leadership with respect to gender. It seems that may not be true. It appears from the Dice survey that women aren’t paid the same as men for bringing the same value to the company.

Technology is an interesting business in that a large number of people are content to be free agents or contractors working for themselves. So, though I’m not sure of the statistical data Dice used, I’m assuming the disparity between men’s and women’s salaries is in regard to full-time positions within companies. I hope human resources departments will continue to seek out new ways to create pay consistency within organizations. I thought we were past the days of gender pay discrepancies, but apparently I was wrong.

I encourage people to compare their salaries at sites like salary.com to see if they’re being competitively paid.

Nick Reddin is the business development manager at Manpower Inc.’s Des Moines office.