November 5, 2008

Female Professors at U. of Texas-Austin Earn $9,000 Less Than Male Peers

Female professors at the University of Texas at Austin earned an average of $9,028 less than their male counterparts in 2007, and senior female faculty members there feel more isolated and less recognized for their work than do their male colleagues.

Those are among the findings of a new report on gender issues affecting the faculty that was written by a 22-member panel created by the university’s provost in 2007.

In a news release issued this week, the university said the provost, Steven W. Leslie, had accepted the panel’s recommendation that the university develop a five- to 10-year plan to reduce or eliminate gender inequity on its faculty.

The panel also found that more women than men at Texas left before winning tenure, and of those who stayed a smaller proportion of women than men achieved tenure within seven years. Thirty-six percent of women hired as assistant professors in 1997 had earned tenure and been promoted to associate professor within seven years, compared with 56 percent of men. The task force also conducted a survey of faculty members that found that 14 percent of female professors said they had been sexually harassed.

Gender inequities in the professoriate have been a major concern for other prominent universities — most notably Harvard University, which has had a poor record of offering tenure to women, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which nearly a decade ago conducted a gender-equity review like the one at Texas and found similar results. —Robin Wilson

Comments

1. My own experience with these studies is that the inequities are always demonstrated in the aggregate, that is, typically part of a flawed regression equation that precisely measures income and ambiguously measures productivity. When we said, fine, let’s address the individual cases where a particular woman is underpaid and the specific reasons why, the opposition melted away, presumably because the unaggregated cases didn’t seem as clear as the situation taken as a whole. The lesson I took from this is that inequities are best handled on a case-by-case basis, rather than part of a far-flung study that cannot correctly process the predictor variables.

   — kp    Nov 5, 12:59 PM    #

2. “Unaggreggated cases didn’t seem as clear …” Sounds like gobbledook from the notoriously sexist economics department, where sex ratios are usually about 25:1, male to female. In 1982, I wrote a similar expose about underpaid female faculty at my university. Nothing has changed, not even the wornout arguments about “human capital,” she had a baby and wrote one less article, she failed to bargain hard upon entry (code for we took advantage of her when we hired her), she served on too many committees (which her chair required) and didn’t write enough at promotion time (while she provided gazillion hours in service) … familiar sexist CRAP. Equal pay for equal work PERIOD. No apologies. No excuses. Women are valuable and vital to academia. Indeed, without underpaying female faculty the budget might have to cut into the football department. OOOh let’s not go there. And while making less money she got little or no pay/support when she had a baby. Would have been better to have a heart attack, 6 to 12 weeks paid, supportive colleagues, in the middle of a semester no less. Class action lawsuit and enforcement of federal legislation are the only solution.

   — Dr. Mo    Nov 5, 04:04 PM    #

3. Were these findings corrected for confounding variables like, oh, academic specialty?

   — Take Back the U!    Nov 5, 04:13 PM    #

4. Don’t worry. Obama will fix it all.

   — IG    Nov 5, 04:29 PM    #

5. Why do so many of the comments on Chronicle articles sound as if they come from cranky old white men? Are they the only ones not busy with really useful academic activities?

   — johntee    Nov 5, 04:47 PM    #

6. so kp (#1)….what you are trying to say is that female professors are not as “productive” as their male counter-parts? Please give us the benefits of your analysis of black, asian & hispanic instructors too. We want to know if you’re also a bigot or just a chauvinist pig.

   — Gary    Nov 5, 05:04 PM    #

7. I was expressly told that I couldn’t negotiate salary by a member of the administration. Later, I discovered that a male colleague did not receive this response and negotiated a higher starting salary. All I can say is that I learned a valuable lesson-take what they offer and add 5K to 9K to it. Then, if they reject your counter-offer, decide whether you really want the job or not. Part of the solution to gender pay inequity has to come from women standing up for their own worth and taking the risks that stance implies. Men do it all the time.

   — J.D.    Nov 5, 05:34 PM    #

8. It’s always interesting to read comments from people who did not even bother to click on the link and read the report. All of your concerns are explicitly addressed therein.

   Yes, they did control for discipline. No, they did not control for productivity, even though most of the wage gap was concentrated among the most productive faculty.

   The gender pay gap was only statistically significant at the full professor level, and for non-tenure track instructors.

   The report also speculates that female faculty use leaves of absence more than males, which extends their time to promotion. However, child care is not a significant factor.

   Some of the human capital controls do reduce the wage gap.

   Read the report. Unless statistically modeling is “gobbledy-gook” to you, in which case your predetermined ideological knee-jerk response is probably the best you can muster.

   — tb    Nov 5, 05:51 PM    #

9. As my kindegarten teacher used to say, let’s play nice boys and girls!

   — Innocent By-Stander    Nov 6, 08:34 AM    #

10. Ditto #2 and #6…#7 so true, but when I did negotiate like a man I was told that people would see me as a department destroying shrew…I decided I needed the money (and I only got half of what I asked for). I am very productive, still underpaid, and apparently a shrew.

    — DJ    Nov 6, 08:51 AM    #

11. I would find it hard to believe that within a given discipline there was any department where women were earning anything less than men.

    I don’t find any comparisons withing disciplines within this study. Could it be that these comparisons destroy the conclusions.

    More fair studies are cited at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GenderSalaryDifferences

    — Robert E. Jensen    Nov 6, 09:17 AM    #

12. Get DOWN, Dr. Mo!
    Tell it like it is.

    — Ginger    Nov 6, 09:52 AM    #

13. The study is very vague about controlling for differences by discipline. It would have been much better had the study showed us differences is in starting salaries between men and women by discipline. If there were differences here it’s time to get a pit bull lawyer.
    It would’ve been nice to make similar gender comparisons among full professors after factoring out the super-salaried endowed professorships.
    Where there may be differences is in the associate professor ranks, especially if there are “permanent” associate professors who are tenured but have not been promoted for ten or more years. I think it might be more fair in this case to compare salary differences between men and women by discipline in the year of promotion to full professorships. If there are differences here it would be very disturbing.

    — Robert E. Jensen    Nov 6, 10:08 AM    #

14. It amazes me that despite the fact that year after year after year, report after report after report demonstrates that women are paid less, respected less, and promoted less, that many purportedly educated folks have a hard time accepting the data. You can pretty much always quibble about one or more methodological aspects of a study, but when hundreds of studies using different methodologies all reach the same conclusion, it is a bit difficult to deny it. But then, our president doesn’t think global warming is real.

    — Meshiko    Nov 6, 11:03 AM    #

15. I agree with Robert Jensen. If there are differences between salaries of women and men within disciplines for the same rank and productivity they need to see a lawyer. Women by law should make as much as men! This was affirmed by a Butte, Montana judge in the mid -1970s.

    — LJ    Nov 6, 11:33 AM    #

16. If you read appendix 3 of the report, the report is not vague about how they control for discipline. It is excessively explicit – we use hierarchical linear modeling to control for discipline (for more info see Appendix 3). Also the report includes large sections based on qualitative research that should not be discounted.

    — Anna Mueller    Nov 6, 11:59 AM    #

17. I’m not surprised by this. The report is just stating the obvious.

    — ap    Nov 6, 12:36 PM    #

18. LJ (#15), unless a woman discovers a pay discrepancy within 180 days of hire, she can’t sue. Check out the U.S. Supreme Court’s judgment on the Lilly Ledbetter case. Also, employees of the state of Texas can be fired for no reason within the first year of their employment. So IF a woman knows she’s being paid less that quickly, and if she then sues, she can be fired with no recourse.

    — O.C.    Nov 6, 01:01 PM    #

19. The report obfuscates when it uses the expression “fund intellectual diversity” as a synonym for paying women more. Why not just be direct and say that in order to fix the problem of underpaying women, we need to pay them more? Perhaps “funding intellectual diversity” is legal while overtly increasing pay for women is not.

    — Erik Jensen    Nov 6, 03:16 PM    #

20. O.C.—The case at Montana State University was a Class Action where two women in the PE Department were paid less than a male in the same department with the same years of experience and they all taught activity courses. I think all three faculty members had about 10 years of service at the university. Therefore, women can make sure they earn as much as men in the same diciplines
    with equal rank and productivity if they attain legal help.

    — LJ    Nov 6, 05:05 PM    #

21. I did sue – does anyone know how difficult this is at a private university? It is almost impossible – they do not give the records, only a federal court can force them to do so. When the judges on the federal bench attended that private university, and serve on its Law School Board – it is almost impossible to surmount the hurdles – and I am not the only one to have tried and failed at my university. Even if a woman publishes five times what a man does, and has equal or higher teaching evaluations, they can roll out the ‘difficult,’ ‘non-collegial’ etc arguments – or even out and out lies – and the plaintiff finds it almost impossible to counter. Trust me, I know; the courts are no help, the anti-discrimination laws are written so tightly that even when the EEO gives you a right to sue letter, you have only breached the first of the formidable defenses the deep pockets (and they DO have deep pockets for such matters) of the university. When there are only a couple of other women on the faculty, and none at your rank – you can forget it. So those who say to get a pit bull lawyer, I say, sure, chew up all the equity in your house, but even a pit bull cannot overcome the solidarity among judges and the law schools that trained them and for whom they teach classes from time to time, and from whence they draw their clerks…Oh, you people thought these things were decided on the basis of the law, and not this mushy qualitative stuff? Wait till you try to help a student who has informed you of sexual harassment by a faculty member – then they REALLY go after you, because in their view, YOU, the bearer of the message, put their good name at risk.
    The university where I teach has no qualms about lying, getting people to lie, and using the most ruthless tactics to silence dissent. Sure, a lawsuit.

    — gr    Nov 6, 10:32 PM    #

Previous: Sewerage-Scholarship Measure Is Wiped Out at Akron Polls
Next: 2 Ivy League Universities, Hit by Financial Crisis, Announce Hiring Freezes