Measuring Gender Bias in the Salaries of Tenured Faculty Members

Abstract

Since the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and subsequent extension to the academic labor market in the 1970s, numerous studies have attempted to measure the level of pay disparity between male and female faculty members. A key feature of these studies is the need to identify nongender (or nonsex)-related covariates that affect faculty compensation and, when used as explanatory variables, remove the effects of these factors in measuring male and female pay disparity. Along with a one-zero variable for a person's gender (or sex), most analysts agree that factors such as faculty member's academic experience, educational attainment, and field or discipline should be included among the regressors used to explain individual salaries. The use of other factors has generated considerable controversy in courtrooms and journal articles. A list of twenty-four faculty salary studies and the extent to which they controlled for various factors is provided in Table 1.1. Of all the factors typically considered for inclusion in a model of faculty salary determination, the most controversial is academic rank. Because salary increases usually accompany promotions, the argument for including rank in an explanation of salaries is clear; the rank of each faculty member appears as a significant predictor of salaries. Even among tenured faculty members, however, if women are not promoted from the associate to full professor rank at a rate commensurate with their qualifications, then the resulting gender coefficient in a salary regression, which also includes the rank of each faculty member as an independent variable, would understate the total level of gender-based salary disparity. Women who are not promoted to the full professor rank because of their gender but who are still employed at the

Gender Disparity in STEM Disciplines: A Study of Faculty Attrition and Turnover Intentions

“…The severity of women faculty's concerns with research support, advancement opportunities, and free expression of ideas can be gauged by the finding related to their satisfaction with salary. Data used in this study suggests that women were paid much less than men (see Table 1), which is expected because numerous studies have documented salary disparity for women faculty even after salary-generating factors are controlled for (Becker and Toutkoushian 2003;Hagedorn 1996;Smart 1991;Toutkoushian 1998;Toutkoushian and Conely 2005;Umbach 2007). Interestingly though, men are the ones more likely to leave for another position when dissatisfied with salary.…”

What kind of faculty are motivated to perform research by the desire for promotion?

“…But if promotion is only a proxy for a salary increase, then a merit pay system based on faculty research performance probably would serve well to enhance faculty research performance. In American experience, where merit-pay system has a long history, the fact that female faculty members are paid less than their male colleagues should serve as a cautionary lesson to Asian countries (Sosin, Rives, & West, 1998;Carlin & Partick, 2000;Becker & Toutkoushian, 2003). In many of the East Asian societies, with their tradition of deference to senior figures and of male dominance, implementing a merit-pay system, which is fair to disadvantaged faculty groups such as young and female faculty is particularly problematic.…”

Legal issues and statistical approaches to reverse pay discrimination in higher education

“…The dependent variable is the annualized base salary for each faculty member. With the possible exception of academic rank, which has been criticized by some as being tainted by gender bias in promotion (Becker and Toutkoushian, 2003), the variables used in the study are consistent with those used in many other institutional studies (see Barbezat, 2002;Becker and Toutkoushian, 2003;Ferber and Loeb, 2002;Ransom and Megdal, 1993). As we noted earlier, however, the choice of variables used in the salary model will not affect whether male faculty would be entitled to salary adjustments according to the alternatives we described here, nor will it affect the relative size of the cost of removing inequities for males and females.…”

“…The field of higher education has not been immune to this issue. As documented by Ransom and Megdal (1993), Toutkoushian (1994), Barbezat (2002), Becker and Toutkoushian (2003) and others, a number of institutions of higher education have conducted studies to measure the pay disparity between male and female faculty on their campus. Many of these studies were initiated as a result of legal action filed against the institution on behalf of female faculty.…”