2 Lawsuits Highlight Pay Gap for Female Administrators

Courtesy of Patricia MacCorquodale

When a former dean at the University of Arizona filed a gender-discrimination lawsuit against her employer last month, her complaint sharply illustrated the stark differences in pay between men and women in the administrative ranks of academe, and how ineffective decades of equal-pay laws and pleas for change have been in leveling the playing field.

Patricia MacCorquodale, a professor of gender and women’s studies at Arizona, alleged in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court that she spent almost two decades trying to persuade administrators to pay her on a par with male deans there. Several less-experienced male deans earned tens of thousands of dollars more than she did in the years before she stepped down as dean of the university’s Honors College in 2016, according to the suit.

The pay disparity at the heart of MacCorquodale’s claim has long been a problem for women at nearly every level of the academic workplace, including administration. According to a recent research brief on the gender pay gap among administrators, including deans, women earn about eighty cents on each dollar that men in similar positions do. It’s a disparity that has stayed roughly the same for 15 years, according to the brief produced by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The median salary for female deans was $126,057 — $25,000 less than the median for men in the same position.

The deanship is a gateway job to administrative positions higher on the academic ladder and, according to CUPA-HR data for 2016-17, women in the job face a pay gap more severe than those of people in other administrative roles, like department chairs and assistant deans.

And the debate about what factors contribute to the persistence of the administrative pay gap continues. Researchers have pointed to several factors: Women often fail to negotiate or are unwilling to relocate to increase their salaries, among other things. But in some instances, women say, their efforts to bolster their salaries are still denied — and, ultimately, such things are beside the point.

“There’s no way of knowing what the underlying factors are. But really, they no longer matter,” said Jacqueline Bichsel, director of research at the college human-resources group. The organization conducts an annual salary study of college administrators on which the research brief was based. “Obviously, women aren’t as valued as men in administrative positions. There’s no other factor that’s going to explain why that much of a gender gap has persisted for decades,” Bichsel said.

It’s also worth noting, she added, that the pay gap in higher education is not much different from the one that separates men and women in other fields in the United States. “In institutions where we supposedly have more liberal attitudes and more equitable polices, there’s still a pervasive culture of women not being treated equally,” she said.

$100,000 Less

The pay disparity detailed in MacCorquodale’s $2-million collective-action lawsuit is substantial. She discovered her pay was out of line with that of her peers not long after she became founding dean of Arizona’s Honors College in 1999. Her then-salary of almost $97,000 made her the lowest paid of all 18 academic deans, her suit claims. And although she received intermittent salary increases, they were far from enough to bring MacCorquodale — who came to Arizona straight from graduate school in 1978 — to parity with male deans.

Meanwhile, her male successors — one temporary and one permanent — received annual salaries that were $100,000 and almost $70,000, respectively, more than what MacCorquodale was paid in her last full academic year, the lawsuit maintains.

This is an issue that Annette Kolodny, a former dean of the College of Humanities at Arizona, is intimately familiar with. Kolodny, who set up a committee on academic discrimination at the National Women’s Studies Association, stepped down from her deanship in 1993. “I know from my own experience as dean that I was not paid in accord with male deans,” Kolodny said. That pay disparity continued, she said, when she returned to the faculty and had to take a steeper pay cut than did male deans.

A spokesman for the University of Arizona did not respond to a request for comment about the allegations from the former deans.

“These pay gaps exist all across academia,” said Kolodny. “This is a particularly propitious moment because the nation as a whole is waking up to the fact that the workplace for women is very different than it is for men.”

Kolodny, now a professor emerita of American literature and culture at Arizona, acknowledges that there are “clearly market forces at work” that boost the salaries of deans from certain disciplines — often male-dominated — that can command high pay in the private sector. Yet, in the College of Humanities the work of overseeing just under 200 full-time faculty members who taught about 2,000 graduate and undergraduate students was demanding, said Kolodny, who was the dean for five years.

Such disciplinary differences in deans’ pay are revealed in CUPA-HR’s research. The median salaries for a dean of medicine and a dean of engineering in 2016-17 were $535,000 and $263,000 respectively. Women are also underrepresented as deans in those two disciplines, as well as in law and pharmacology. In comparison, deans of education had a median salary of $155,000 and deans of arts and sciences earned a median salary of $160,000.

But the undervaluing of women administrators isn’t across the board, according to CUPA-HR’s research. In some cases, women’s salaries are at a premium. In high-profile administrative positions that are overwhelmingly held by men — such as chief financial officer or chief of information technology — women often make more than their male counterparts.

Heavier Workload

Equal-pay laws have been on the books for decades, but when the promise of those laws’ protection doesn’t pan out, women administrators often turn to the courts for relief. Last year, an assistant vice provost at the University of Virginia sued the institution, claiming that her workload outstripped that of her male colleagues who were paid more than she was. In her federal lawsuit, Betsy Ackerson alleged that Virginia ignored her “repeated complaints about the disparity in her pay” for four years.

She was hired in 2012, initially in a one-year appointment, to help create Virginia’s strategic plan. She was paid $70,000 and her duties were expanded, but her paycheck didn’t adequately reflect her new responsibilities, the lawsuit said. In addition, the suit alleged, even when her pay was increased to $110,000, male colleagues who performed similar duties earned salaries of between $113,000 and $185,000. And, the suit claimed, other senior administrators commented on how much of the workload on the strategic plan Ackerson appeared to carry out.

When Ackerson went on medical leave, the institution took away her private office and gave her marks on her performance review that didn’t match her accomplishments — actions the lawsuit deemed retaliatory.

Virginia, in a court filing, denied the claims. Various pretrial motions in the case are pending, and a jury trial is scheduled for July.

In the end, top administrators like the provost and the president set the tone for what deans and others doing administrative work are paid, and they are the ones who should be held accountable, Bichsel said. Appropriate benchmarking, she said, is key.

“Spending time trying to explain why the gap exists is a waste of time,” Bichsel said. “Find out where inequities exist and then put your budget dollars into rectifying them.”

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.