Houston rises in the ranks among the top cities for women in tech

we're no. 3

Houston is again ranked a top city for women in tech. Photo via Getty Images

Houston has again made it into the top cities for women in tech — beating out everywhere but Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Up four spots compared to last year, Houston comes in third place on SmartAsset's eighth annual list, which factors in four metrics: gender pay gap in the tech industry, income for women in tech after deducting housing costs, women as a percentage of tech workers, and three-year growth in tech employment. Aside from Houston, Texas's only other top 15 representation is Fort Worth, which ranks as No. 6.

The Bayou City ranks No.1 overall for the gender pay gap —women earned 98 percent of what men do in the tech workforce on average, the report finds. Female tech workers earn $65,662 after housing expenses are accounted for — ranking ninth-best. Between 2017 and 2020, total tech employment grew by 13 percent and in that workforce, 27.5 percent of workers are women.

The annual study found that while the tech industry is seeing steady growth and is projected to see another 178,000 tech jobs enter the market in 2022, the gender gap is also consistently disappointing. Women only make up 26.1 percent of all tech workers, per the report, and earn just 84 percent of what their male counterparts do.

The West Coast doesn't make a great impact on the list this year.

"Surprisingly, no California cities made the top 10," SmartAsset reports. "Overall, California cities fall behind for tech employment growth over the last three years and the gender pay gap. The highest ranked California city is Sacramento which ties for No. 11 with Nashville, Tennessee."

Houston ranked No. 6 on the same study in 2020 and No. 4 in 2019.

Houston has been deemed the sixth best city for women in technology, according to a SmartAsset report. Christina Morillo/Pexels

Houston named among the top cities for women in technology

Who runs the world?

Houston fell two places in SmartAsset's latest ranking of the best U.S. cities for women in technology but remains in the top 10.

SmartAsset's sixth annual study, released February 6, puts Houston at No. 6 among the top cities for women in tech. That's down from the No. 4 spot in SmartAsset's 2019 study. However, Houston still holds the No. 1 ranking among Texas cities.

"Only one of five most-populated U.S. cities — Houston — makes it into our top 15 cities for women working in the tech industry," says SmartAsset, a personal finance website.

In all, SmartAsset analyzed 59 of the largest U.S. cities to find the best places for women in tech to work and live. The website judged each city on four factors:

  • Gender pay gap in the tech industry
  • Average earnings after subtracting median costs for housing
  • Women as a percentage of the tech workforce
  • Four-year growth in tech employment

In Houston, average earnings for women in tech represented 99 percent of men's earnings in 2018, SmartAsset found. That amounts to a difference of $451. Houston also boasts the eighth highest average amount of earnings for women in tech after deducting costs for housing ($64,464), according to SmartAsset.

Furthermore, the study shows women hold down 25.8 percent of tech jobs in Houston, compared with the 59-city average of 26.1 percent.

Houston's showing in the SmartAsset study bolsters the region's amped-up efforts to evolve into a tech hub.

In April 2019, the Wall Street Journal noted those efforts were jump-started after Amazon rejected Houston as a candidate for the e-commerce giant's hotly pursued second headquarters. These initiatives include attracting startups and venture capital, and ramping up programs aimed at accelerating innovation.

"We already knew we were not in the top tier of what has been happening globally as far as innovation," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told the Wall Street Journal. "But Amazon passing us over was a real wake-up call that we could not be walking towards building this new ecosystem. We had to sprint."

Here are the top 10 cities for women in tech, according to SmartAsset:

  1. Baltimore
  2. Washington, D.C.
  3. Arlington, Virginia
  4. Chesapeake, Virginia
  5. Albuquerque, New Mexico
  6. Houston
  7. Long Beach, California,
  8. Chandler, Arizona
  9. Philadelphia
  10. Durham, North Carolina

In the SmartAsset study, Houston fared much better than its big-city counterparts in Texas. Fort Worth came in at No. 17, with Plano tied for 27th, San Antonio tied for 37th, Irving at No. 39, Austin at No. 49, and Dallas at No. 54 (five spots from the bottom).

To find the best cities for women in tech, SmartAsset looked at data for cities that had at least 200,000 residents in 2018. The website then removed cities that lacked reliable data, leaving a pool of 59 cities.

Findings in the SmartAsset study stand in contrast to a recent ranking by CompTIA, a tech industry trade group, of the 20 best metro areas in the U.S. for IT jobs. Austin ranked first, and Dallas appeared at No. 7. Houston didn't make the list.
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Rice student startup lands $1.85M to launch medical drone network

critical cargo

Students at Rice University have developed a medical cargo drone transport system to help deliver sensitive medical supplies and improve mobile healthcare efforts.

Haast Autonomous is the brainchild of graduating seniors Ege Halac, Jason Chen and Santiago Brent, who got their venture idea off the ground with help from the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) Summer Venture Studio. The founders have developed the prototype at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) with fellow Rice researchers Felix Hasson, Ethan Javedan, Kenna Sanders and Caden Schmidt.

The startup has raised $1.85 million in pre-seed funding, according to Rice. The founders plan to focus on Haast full-time following graduation. They said they aim to launch pilot trials in 2027 and head to market later that year.

“We need better alternatives for a fast, safe and on-demand system of transport for life-critical cargo,” Halac said in a news release from Rice.

The Haast team has developed a custom aircraft with software that manages dispatch, routes, and chain of custody to assist in how materials move between sites in centralized medical systems. Generally, the transportation of medical supplies and materials between facilities and points of care relies on ground shipping or expensive air transport.

Haast Autonomous’ aircraft can take off and land vertically, and is designed around a mission profile of 50 to 62 miles. It can carry a payload of at least 5 pounds, with future versions intended to scale up in size. It also includes a built-in payload bay that regulates temperature, pressure, vibration and tilt to protect sensitive contents such as patient samples, antivenom or poisoning kits and radioligands or other therapies, according to Rice.

At first, the company envisioned the mission to be centered around transplants, but saw the product being best suited for a variety of operations.

“What we realized is that the platform we are building is suited for medicine, but it really underlies a much larger problem of mission-critical transport across industries,” Brent added in the news release. “We are building the fastest, most secure logistics chain for the world’s most sensitive cargo.”

Haast Autonomous was recognized at the 2026 Oshman Engineering Design Showcase and Competition, where it won Best Aerospace or Transportation Technology. It also performed well in the 2026 Napier Rice Launch Challenge.

In the future, Haast Autonomous plans to deploy a fleet of aircraft. The software will be designed to assist hospitals in requesting flights and tracking deliveries in real time.

“The drone is only part of the solution,” Chen also added in the release. “What matters is moving something from point A to point B in a way that fits into how hospitals already operate.”

Houston scientist wins prestigious Pew Scholar award for brain cancer research

standout scholar

Christina Tringides, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, is one of 21 scientists to win a prestigious Pew Biomedical Scholar award.

She is the first faculty member from Rice to win the distinction, which provides $300,000 over four years for advances in biomedicine, according to the university. The awards are granted to researchers who are in the first few years at the assistant professor level.

In Tringides’ case, the funding will support her innovative new method of modeling glioblastoma, a common and extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Thanks to producing its own blood supply, glioblastoma spreads quickly, weaving tendrils of blighted tissue throughout the brain. Because of this, surgery is difficult and conventional therapies ineffective.

Understanding the way glioblastoma spreads is crucial to the search for a cure. Tringides is using hydrogels that mimic the brain’s extracellular matrix. Using cultures and a microscopic labyrinth, her team can see how the cancer spreads, bonds with neurons and changes cell wall activity. Essentially, Tringides has devised an intelligence test for tumors in hopes of learning how to outsmart them.

“As cancer crawls through the maze, we can look at how it is interacting with the neurons more and more, and measure how electrical activity is changing as a result,” she said in a news release from Rice.

Examining how cancer cells grow can reveal which conditional changes slow them down. Finding ways to alter the structure of brain matter in a way that makes it inhospitable to the cancer could lead to therapies that would impede growth or even reverse it. Using her custom-made ersatz brain maze makes it easier to observe changes than it would be in a patient’s brain.

“Imaging synapses is time-intensive ⎯ it can involve large data files that are hard to visualize, but if we know that the only place where we might have a synapse is this tiny 1-by-4-by-10 micron channel, it makes it much faster and reliable to image them,” Tringides said.

Born in Ames, Iowa, Tringides received her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard before joining Rice in 2024 through a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award.

Her research was also one of the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice Brain Institute and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

Texas residents earn 11th highest income in U.S., says 2026 study

Money Matters

A new WalletHub study comparing income disparities across America has ranked Texas residents No. 11 on the list of states with the highest earning residents in the nation.

The report, "States Where People Have the Highest Income (2026)," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau income data in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report evaluated the average annual income of the top five percent, the median annual household income, and the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of residents in every state, all adjusted for the cost of living.

The report's data revealed the top five percent of Texans, the highest earners, make $520,378 on average yearly after adjusting for the cost of living. That's the seventh-highest income among the top five percent of earners nationwide.

Meanwhile, the median annual income of a Texas household is just under $76,000. The bottom 20 percent of Texas residents make $17,651 a year, the report found.

For additional context, the latest data from the Federal Reserve shows an American household's median yearly income is about $83,700. WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo also found that the highest earning 10 percent of individuals in the U.S. earn over 12 times more than those in the lowest-earning 10 percent, based on the latest Census data.

"By measuring the income of various percentiles against a state's median income, we can better identify where income disparities are more prevalent, which could help us better understand why residents of certain states struggle more to make ends meet," said Lupo.

Virginia is the state where residents earn the highest income in the U.S., WalletHub said. Based on the report's findings, the top five percent of Virginians make $545,097 on average per year after adjusting for the cost of living. The median annual income of a Virginia household comes out to $95,339, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $19,671 annually on average.

Conversely, West Virginia is the state where people have the lowest income in the U.S. A West Virginia household makes a median annual income of $56,610, the third-lowest nationally, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $13,260 on average per year, which is the fifth-lowest in the nation. The top five percent of West Virginians make $372,218 on average per year.

The top 10 states where residents have the highest income are:

  • No. 1 – Virginia
  • No. 2 – New York
  • No. 3 – New Jersey
  • No. 4 – Washington
  • No. 5 – Connecticut
  • No. 6 – Utah
  • No. 7 – Colorado
  • No. 8 – Minnesota
  • No. 9 – Illinois
  • No. 10 – Massachusetts

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

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