The first count

This was DPA's first survey. 323 designers answered it, most of them in Singapore, so read what follows as the first time the community tried to write its own pay down, uneven sample and all.

The number that travelled furthest was the gender pay gap. Among Singapore respondents, women's raw median total compensation sat 42% below men's. Most of that reflects who was in each group: the women in the sample were, on average, about four years earlier in their careers, and career stage is one of the strongest predictors of pay in this data. Hold seniority still and the gap narrows without closing. At senior individual-contributor level, where the cohort was largest, women's median still ran roughly a fifth below men's.

A quieter finding sat next to it. More men than women said they had negotiated their pay, 61% against 51%. The survey could not tell us how much that feeds the gap, only that the two patterns showed up together.

Away from the gap, the survey caught a field that was young and, on its own account, fairly content. Hybrid work had settled in as the norm, and comfort with working arrangements scored higher than any other sentiment measured. That contentment sat on top of long hours: two in three designers reported working beyond their contracted week.

Those gaps and half-answers set the shape of what comes next: a wider survey, across more of the region, built to test what 323 people in one city could only begin to suggest.