Job and wage growth in Oregon's tech sector has slowed considerably, and the industry's share of the state's employment market is shrinking, according to new research from Josh Lehner, an Oregon state economist.

Technology employers helped lead Oregon out of the Great Recession, with big gains in jobs and wages from 2009 through 2013. The industry became as important to Oregon's economy as the wood products industry was in its heyday during the 1970s.

Oregon tech has continued to expand over the past four years and still pays some of the state's best wages, the research indicates. But its growth rate now lags the broader state economy.

Tech employment in Oregon, which grew by 6.6 percent in 2010, expanded less than 1 percent in each of the past two years, the numbers show, and tech's share of Oregon's job market has fallen modestly in that time.

Wages across all Oregon jobs are growing faster, in percentage terms, than tech salaries.

That's not to underplay tech's importance. With an annual average wage of more than $108,000, tech workers earn more than double the state average. The industry still accounts for more than 11.3 percent of all Oregon wages.

The Silicon Forest's roots are, as the name suggests, in manufacturing electronics hardware and computer chips. In the late '90s, when hardware dominated Oregon's tech industry, technology peaked at 6.6 percent of all jobs in the state.

Domestic electronics manufacturing began a steep slide during the 1990s, due to offshoring and automation. And in Oregon, software hasn't picked up the slack. The state still attracts a relatively small share of the nation's venture capital and, since the dot-com era, has produced few homegrown tech companies of any size.

Despite the proliferation of software and web services companies in Portland's core, many of the region's biggest and fastest-growing tech businesses are hardware companies in the suburbs. That list includes Phoseon, newly public nLight Corp., and Oregon's oldest tech company -- Electro Scientific Industries.

While the number of Oregon software jobs passed the hardware sector in 2012, Lehner finds Oregon's software industry has grown no faster than the national rate since 2003.

"Nothing wrong with this, of course," Lehner said in an email. But he notes that software hasn't offered Oregon an advantage relative to other states the way hardware and semiconductors once did.

-- Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; 503-294-7699