You'd have to take those data points in isolation and conclude "men like money more than women" to earn that label.
I don't think anyone is surprised to see evidence that an exclusive workplace culture contributes to the pay gap. I'd posit that all else being equal, women value compensation and culture about the same as men. The priorities reflected in the survey are a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
> The tech industry is struggling overall with issues around diversity, and individual developers are not making it a priority when looking for a job.
So perhaps it's not the "tech industry" that's struggling, it's some vocal minority that would like to convince you it does.
That question is not "how satisfied are you with the state of each of these things now", it's "how much do you weight these categories when assessing new jobs". The fact that women don't put diversity at the top doesn't mean that they think that the state of diversity is good. It means that it's not a highly ranks job-selection criteria.
What people are prioritizing in a job hunt is what they're not getting in their current job. Women put "The office environment or company culture" first, men put it fourth. Why? Because women leave jobs because they get treated poorly. Men leave jobs because they think someone else will pay them more.
For most people, the priority is not in making sure their company looks like a college brochure, it's in finding a place where people will treat them with dignity.
What a stereotyping generalization.
Also, underpaying is a (fairly common) form of poor treatment.
My wife works at a tech organization that is (unsurprisingly) mostly men. The data here seem to align quite well with what she has told me several times. Namely, she doesn't much care about diversity at the workplace since she feels the organization's values and culture result in her being respected and able to be a valuable member of the team regardless of who she is working with.
When she is able to work with other women in the organization, she does find that refreshing. So I think she would like to see more women among the team, but it's not something she thinks about much, putting it below other more important matters.
How can you be labeled sexist if you point out a simple fact?
This is the "simple" fact:
> Women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender" in a StackOverflow survey targeted at people (mostly developers) who use stackoverflow
This is the additional fact that has been added:
> [that fact is] a contributing factor for the pay gap
And then the phrase
> you can be labeled as sexist
is added, which of course can be applied to anything anyone ever says about anything gender related.
If you deliberately add unsubstantiated information to a fact you will probably be called out for it, and rightly so (IMO).
So while the fact itself may be true, the causation could be different from the implied causation by the presenter. For example I'm sure you noticed that women skew younger on this survey. If people are earlier in their career perhaps experience and culture matter more than pay. People later in their careers have families to worry about, so they want more pay and care less about culture and languages.
I'm not saying I'm correct in this assessment, but what I'm getting at is there needs to be greater context around "facts" beyond the first thing that pops into your mind. Facts can be twisted in many ways to hurt people, be more critical of the things people say on the internet.
So the survey data may be a hint that it's not entirely a myth.
My personal experience would be that developers are bad at (or hate) negotiating salaries anyway :)
Adjusting for your argument the answers are as follows:
Men:
19.0% The compensation and benefits offered
17.6% The languages, frameworks, and other technologies I'd be working with
15.7% Opportunities for professional development
16.8%. Opportunities for professional development
16.4% The languages, frameworks, and other technologies I'd be working with
14.1%. The compensation and benefits offered
Unless you want to argue that women should knowingly accept positions where they will be discriminated against, the effect of sexism is that the viable job pool for women is smaller for reasons outside their control.
Perhaps the women that responded would rather get paid less than work in a bro culture because they find it unbearable, not because they don't value being compensated well.
One exception is when higher salary is because of "moral values and ethics" trade-offs. And I would be very careful before I would imply that men are more likely to do that trade-off.
I'm surprised that Elixir was the 6th most loved language last year and disappeared this time, while Erlang gained some points. Was it even in the survey?
Also it's interesting that women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender", but if you point that fact as a contributing factor for the pay gap you can be labeled as sexist.