If you're a female tech professional, there's good news and bad news about pay, depending on your role and also how you tend to look at things.

The good news: If you're an IT staffer, the gap in salaries paid to male versus female workers seems to be closing a bit, according to findings of the recent InformationWeek Research 2006 National IT Salary Survey.

For IT staffers, the gap between male and female workers isn't as wide as two years ago, when female staff earned a median base salary of $63,000 in 2004 and males made $70,000.

Female tech staffers this year are earning slightly more than last year--$64,000--while median base pay for males has stayed flat at $70,000.

Now the bad news: If you're an IT manager, the difference between what women and men earn might actually be widening, according to the survey. On top of that, pay for woman managers might actually be slipping.

Female IT managers currently earn an annual median base salary of $81,000, compared to male managers who make $93,000.

While base salaries for male managers edged up slightly--about $1,000--over the last 12 months from $92,000 last year, female managers are making $3,000 less this year than they did over the last two years. They earned a median base salary of $84,000 in 2005 and 2004.

What does this all mean?

Well, first off, one thing to keep in mind is that there are fewer women in IT overall--even of the 10,425 IT professionals who voluntarily responded online in the InformationWeek salary survey, only 1,695 were female, compared with 8,730 who were male. So the disparity in the number of women versus men participating in the survey--as well as in the actual IT workforce--could affect the survey findings as well as actual pay patterns.

Nonetheless, if you crunch the salary survey numbers, it appears that female IT managers this year will earn about 87% of what their male counterparts earn. Meanwhile, female IT staff will earn 91% of what their male counterparts make.

So while it's apparent that men overall still earn bigger paychecks that women in IT, the pay difference is narrower than in the U.S. workplace overall, where the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figured in 1999 that woman earned about 77% of what men earned. So that's more good news for female IT pros, right?

There's a lot of debate about why women earn less overall, with reasons ranging from outright employer discrimination to women banging their heads into corporate glass ceilings and some women choosing to work fewer hours or put career-advancement plans on hold while balancing family commitments.

Carol Pride, CIO at Pinnacle Entertainment, says some women in IT are faced with difficult personal choices, especially when they're juggling families while trying to advance up the career ladder.

"Climbing up the food chain in IT means spending time in an operational environment, for instance in project management, which can be very time-consuming and disruptive to normal work patterns," she says.

"Time-consuming" and "disruptive" can mean being on-call 24x7, including nights and weekends, which can be chaotic when you've got kids, she says. So getting past this rung on the career and pay ladder can be tough, she says.

Another "significant" reason for gender pay discrepancy is due to "deep-rooted" societal and psychological issues, argues Carolyn Leighton, founder, CEO, and chairwoman of WITI, a professional organization for "tech-savvy" women.

Many women are uncomfortable tooting their own horns, i.e. discussing their talents and accomplishments in the context of money, or, namely, negotiating pay, she says.

"Women are trained from an early age that they shouldn't talk about money. It's not polite," she says. So many fail to aggressively negotiate pay, whether it's starting salary or raises along the way, she says. "I want to help women realize that acquiring wealth is not bad and understand how much their contributions [to the workplace] mean," she says. "Wealth is power."

Pinnacle's Pride knows first-hand what it's like to earn a living and climb the ladder in fields dominated by men while juggling a family as well. Before the mother-of-three made the transition to IT a decade ago, she started her career as an engineer in the manufacturing sector.

"I've always been paid quite fairly, but it was a surprise when I learned I could negotiate," says Pride.

"I've become more mercenary. I know what I'm worth in the marketplace," she says. "It's also important to my family--I've got three tuition checks to write," she says.

Do you think you're earning a fair paycheck--and if not, why? I'd like to know.