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March 26, 2008, 02:52 PM ET
Explaining Faculty Pay Gaps
According to a paper presented at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting, the wage gap between male and female professors may be more a product of where they’re employed than what field they’re in, David Glenn reports on The Chronicle’s Web site. The paper’s author, Paul D. Umbach, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Iowa, examined data on nearly 8,000 faculty members at 472 four-year colleges and universities who were surveyed in 2003-4 by the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, a project of the National Center for Education Statistics, and “found that the salary gap is more strongly driven by women’s concentration” at public, master’s-level institutions that place more of a premium on teaching than research and attract less external research money “than by their concentration in certain disciplines, like education and anthropology,” Glenn writes. Of course, that’s not to say the gap isn’t partly due to sexism, Umbach pointed out:
Even after controlling for women’s concentration in disciplines and institutions, Mr. Umbach found an unexplained salary gap between men and women—the sort of gap that might be caused in part by sheer discrimination on the part of administrators—of roughly 4.2 percent. …
“Women may take a double hit, or even a triple hit,” Mr. Umbach continued. “They’re taking a hit, first of all, of roughly 4.2 percent. And then they take a further hit depending on where they’re nested, and they tend to be nested in places where they’re rewarded less.”
Thoughts?
And while we’re on the subject of faculty pay, be sure to read Pamela Johnston’s recent First Person column on the widely held misperception among nonacademics that faculty members earn high salaries.
Categories: Salary-and-benefits
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