It’s Not Just a Pay Gap: Quantifying the Gender Wage and Pension Gap at a Post-Secondary Institution in Canada

Abstract

What is the impact of the gender pay gap in academia over the course of a career and retirement? To quantify this impact, we used a Canadian post-secondary institution as a case study and simulated the effects of the reported difference in salary across multiple academic career trajectories. A starting wage gap of less than $9,000 resulted in a $300,000–$400,000 gender wage gap over the course of a career, and a further $148,000–$259,000 gender pension gap, for a total gender pension and wage gap of $454,000–$660,000, depending on the rank achieved. Thus, focusing on gender gaps in salary alone leads to a substantial underestimation of the long-term effects of the gender gap.

The Gender Pay Gap in Academia: Evidence from the Beedie School of Business

“…Table 3 reports differences in the salaries and variables related to the demographics between male and female faculty members for our sample of 923 academic-year observations. Consistent with prior research (Ward 2001;Smith-Carrier et al 2021;Chen and Crown 2019;Uribe-Bohorquez et al 2023), we documented a gender pay gap, where female academics earned about CAD3000 less per year relative to their male counterparts; however, unlike prior studies, we found that this difference was not statistically significant. In terms of significant differences between the two groups, Table 3 reveals that female academics comprised about 36% of our sample, worked about 2 years less on average at the SFU, and had significantly less work experience prior to joining the SFU.…”

“…The dependent variable is the log of the annual salary, for an individual i in year t. The primary coefficient of interest is β 1 , which represents the estimated wage gap for female (Female) relative to male academics. We then followed prior literature (i.e., Ward 2001;Sayre et al 2000;Chen and Crown 2019;Smith-Carrier et al 2021;Kim et al 2023) and added a set of control variables P it as proxies for productivity for an individual i in year t (obtained from Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and the most recent individual CVs), which included the following (up to year t): the log of citations (Cite), the number of books (#Books), the number of chapters/cases (#Ch/Ca), the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals (#PR Pubs), and the number of publications in journals on the Financial Times list (#FT Pubs); a set of control variables F it as proxies for full-time equivalency, which included (for year t) an indicator variable for part-time (PT), the number of semesters of unpaid leave (UL), the number of semesters of study leave (SL), the number of courses taught as an overload or bought out and not taught (OL), and the number of semesters of parental leave (PL); and a set of control variables X it , which included ethnicity controls (indicators for race/ethnicity-African American, Indian, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American, and Other, including multiple and undisclosed ethnicities, with Caucasian as the omitted category), prior experience controls (indicators for prior academic experience--Prior AE, and prior work experience-Prior WE, and the number of years employed by SFU-#SFU), education controls (indicators for PhD degree-PhD, professional designation and certificate-Des/Cert), and rank and promotion controls (indicators for faculty rank: Assistant-Assist Prof, Associate-Assoc Prof, and Full-Full Prof, with Lecturer and Other-Lect/Other as the omitted category; and indicators for promotions from Lecturer, Assistant, and Associate levels). Table 1 presents the definitions for all the variables utilized in our analysis.…”

“…Chen and Crown (2019) found an 11% pay gap across 23,000 observations and a 5.3% gap within ranks. In a Canadian case study, Smith-Carrier et al (2021) found both an entry gender pay gap close to CAD9000 and longer-term gender gaps attained in people's total career earnings (CAD300,000-CAD400,000) and pension earnings (CAD148,000 and CAD259,000, respectively). Other studies have observed causes for concern such as decreasing female participation rates between the assistant level and childbirth and the full professor level (Greska 2023), a reduction in women receiving tenure relative to men due to the use of "gender-neutral" policies such as pausing the tenure clock for childbirth or adoption (Antecol et al 2018), higher standards for women in the peer review process (Hengel 2022), and more heavily discounting co-authored publications for women than men (Wiedman 2020;Sarsons 2017).…”