The Online Community Report just released its Online Community Compensation Study.

Most of the study's key findings shouldn't come as a surprise to people working in this space: the community team employs more women than men, most team members are between 31 and 50 years old, and most have over five years of work experience. However the compensation figures are a little higher than I expected at an average of US$81k (approximately AU$95k).

I also wasn't expecting women to be earning 91% (on average) of what men are earning. Assuming that factors like experience, industry, average company salary, position in corporate hierarchy, department within the company, importance of community role for company, etc. have all been statistically removed from this analysis -- and they probably haven't all been removed -- then the lower salary for women is most disappointing.

Meanwhile, the most heartening result from the study is, of course, the job satisfaction rating which is an average of 4.2 on a scale of 1 to 5 :)

FYI: OCR's Key Resources blog post category is a great place to look if you want to start or further develop your online community.