Institutions that discover widespread pay disparities by gender, with female professors earning less than their male counterparts, and then try to remedy the gap can find themselves mired in a process that is fraught with tension and results in faculty discord.
Most recently some professors at Western Michigan University clashed with the institution’s provost over the issue as up to 300 tenured female professors awaited a promised pay increase meant to put their salaries on a more equal footing with those of their male colleagues.
At other institutions that have dealt with pay disparities, such as the University of Texas at Austin, discord has not been a problem, but limits on money have curtailed efforts to narrow the divide.
At Western Michigan, administrators had said the salary adjustments would be reflected in the first paycheck of the academic year, but the money didn’t show up and faculty members weren’t forewarned. The delay—coupled with what affected faculty members say has been a lack of communication about the issue—led the institution’s faculty union to approve a measure censuring the provost, Timothy J. Greene, this month.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Greene said that he had just sent professors letters to their campus mailboxes to notify them of their salary adjustments and that the money was slated to show up in their November 19 paychecks. The pool of recipients also now includes women and men.
A closer look at faculty salaries, along with factors such as professors’ discipline, rank, start date of employment, and date of promotion to current rank, showed that Western Michigan needed to consider salary equity “from a different perspective,” Mr. Greene said. “When we looked at the data without looking at gender, we found we had disparities among men and women.”
A Complicated Process
Western Michigan’s decision to study salary inequity by gender in the first place stemmed from language in a 2008 contract with the faculty union, which is an affiliate of the American Association of University Professors. A study of the salary issue found that female professors, on average, earned 4 percent less than their male colleagues did.
The union’s 2011 contract called for the university to take steps to rectify that disparity.
“Coming up with a process to do that was more complicated than we once thought,” Mr. Greene said. “We kept looking at everything over and over again because we wanted to do it right.”
Salary comparisons were made within academic departments, he said, rather than across colleges or the university.
For faculty members on nine-month contracts, salaries will be adjusted retroactively to the beginning of the academic year. Those who are paid over an entire fiscal year will see adjustments dating to July 1.
Mr. Greene said he didn’t know how many faculty members would get the permanent adjustments to their base salary. While the amount each professor will receive varies, the total cost of the increases is “in excess of $550,000,” he said. Much of that had been set aside over the past two budget years.
Lisa C. Minnick, president of Western Michigan’s AAUP chapter, said on Tuesday that the union wasn’t involved in the guidelines used to determine if faculty members would receive extra money and how much. The motion to censure Mr. Greene, she said, “was an expression of frustration on the part of the faculty.”
“This was just a terrible way for them to go about doing this,” said Ms. Minnick, an associate professor of English and of gender and women’s studies. “It’s so divisive.”
After learning that salary-adjustment letters had been delivered, Ms. Minnick said in an email message on Wednesday that the union had not received any information from administrators about how many faculty members would receive boosts in pay and how much they would get. Meanwhile, faculty members who won’t receive more money don’t know why, she said.
It was a surprise to find out that men and women would get pay increases, Ms. Minnick said, but “we are in favor of fair pay for everyone and we are always happy to see the salaries of our colleagues inch closer to what those colleagues deserve to be paid.”
Other Approaches
Over the last decade or so, the University of Maine system, the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison are among institutions that have crunched numbers to unearth pay disparities by gender and have worked to close the gaps.
When the University of Maine set out to study gender equity and salaries among its campuses, officials sought to avoid controversy. They saw forming a joint committee with the faculty union as a key way to gain credibility with faculty members and give them confidence that the process would be transparent, said Tracy Bigney, the system’s chief human-resources officer. The system also hired an outside consultant, Lois Haignere, the author of Paychecks: A Guide to Conducting Salary Equity Studies in Higher Education.
A gender-equity report, produced at Maine in 2000, recommended that systematic adjustments be made when the difference between men’s and women’s salaries exceeded 2 percent of the average male salary for the university or college. The faculty union, the university counsel, outside lawyers, and administrators all worked together to “come up with a way to make individual remedies to salaries,” Ms. Bigney said. Policy changes to support salary equity by gender were also made.
Margaret Patterson, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maine at Augusta, was a member of the committee. She said she received roughly a $3,000 increase in her base salary.
“It was a lot of work making sure we had all the data we needed,” said Ms. Patterson, who has now worked at the institution for 32 years. “We improved some of the worst cases of paying women less than men. But I don’t believe that the problem is ever solved.”
But a follow-up in 2005 did show improvement, Ms. Bigney said, in that there was no evidence of inequities that met the statistical threshold.
In Texas, Signals From the Top
At the University of Texas at Austin, the salaries that female full professors receive, in comparison with those of male full professors, have improved since a 2008 report on gender inequity there.
The report was triggered by anecdotal evidence of pay inequities by gender in the faculty ranks. The university decided to conduct a quantitative study “to see what was actually happening,” said Hillary Hart, chair of the university’s Faculty Council and a senior lecturer in the department of civil engineering. The report showed a gender pay gap at the full-professor level, with women earning 6 percent less than men at that rank in 2007. By 2011 the gap had narrowed, with female full professors earning 4 percent less than their male colleagues.
No money was set aside to narrow the pay gap, in part because the recession had begun to batter the university’s budget. The university’s president and provost at the time, though, instructed deans to keep gender equity in mind during the review process for merit raises in the 2009-10 academic year.
“It’s got to be the top administrators who are focused on this because that sends the strongest signal that this is being taken seriously,” Ms. Hart said. “It’s a really difficult thing to correct.”
In Minnesota, a Broader Focus
At the University of Minnesota, each college will soon have a salary-equity review committee that will use a set of newly developed rubrics to look at faculty salaries through the lens of such factors as gender, discipline, years since degree, years on the job, and merit. An initial study on faculty-salary equity was conducted in 2011, using data from four years earlier, with a focus on gender. But now the focus is broader.
“It’s not that gender is not of interest to us—gender is key—but there may well be men who are out of whack with salary, and we want to address that,” said Arlene Carney, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. Salaries will not be reviewed across colleges.
The most recent salary-equity study at Minnesota, conducted this year using data from 2011, showed that men were paid, on average, 2.4 percent more than women were, after accounting for disciplinary and market differences (but not merit) across all ranks. The goal is to make any salary adjustments in the 2015 fiscal year, Ms. Carney said.
“Compensation is a sensitive issue, and I think it’s imperative that we look at the data and be able to say to people with some confidence that we really believe that you’re being paid fairly,” Ms. Carney said. “Do I think everybody will be happy about this? Probably not. But we’ll learn from that about how to do it better.”
At Western Michigan, Mr. Greene said he feels “very good about the decisions we’ve made.”
“In retrospect,” he added, “I wish I had spent more time communicating what was going on. But I was busy working through all of this to get the money into the hands of the faculty.”