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This is absolutely not a "typical postdoctoral salary", and hasn't been for more than two decades. Most major research institutions follow NIH guidelines for postdoc salaries:

https://www.training.nih.gov/postdoctoral_irta_stipend_range...

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When I was finishing up a bioinformatics doctoral program in 2009 I looked far and wide for postdoc positions in the field. My recollection is that the typical salary range was $27k-$30k. What surprised me was that I dug far back in a systematics-specific newsgroup and found the same salary range being advertised for the previous 10+ years. I can't speak to what has happened over the past 12 years, since the low postdoc salaries pushed me to industry, but I can say that you're off with the "more than two decades" claim, at least as a universal claim.

I just pulled three actual postdoc offer letters out of my email archives from the 2008-2009 period. Salary offers ranged from $38K-$48K with the higher end representing a starting bioinformatics postdoc position.

NIH minimum in 2009 was >$37K. If you were getting offers in the $27K-$30K range coming out of a comp bio/bioinformatics PhD program, you were unfortunately getting seriously low-balled.

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