Women of color earn only 67 cents on the dollar compared with white men in the higher-education work force, according to a recently released research brief from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR.
Specifically, the brief found that women of color are underrepresented in academe, compared with their representation in the U.S. population at large — especially in more lucrative faculty, professional, and administrative roles, versus lower-paying staff positions. And in three out of four job types (professional, staff, and faculty) women of color are paid less than white men, men of color, and white women.
None of this is news to Jacqui Tisdale.
“Sadly, I’m not surprised,” said Tisdale, an assistant director in the dean of students’ office at the University of Rhode Island. “This is something that has been a particular challenge for quite some time, not just for women of color but for women in general.”
Tisdale is co-chair of the university’s Women of Color Network, designed as a space for women to discuss issues facing their demographic. Alycia Mosley Austin, an assistant dean of graduate recruitment and diversity initiatives who serves as the other co-chair, said the group’s experience is proof of how few women of color are employed in academe.
“Many of the women who are part of the group enjoy coming to a group because in our units or offices where we work, we’re the only women of color in those spaces,” Mosley Austin said. “We find the Women of Color Network provides an alternative space where we can have a shared experience.”
Jasper McChesney, a data-visualization researcher at CUPA-HR who wrote the brief, said his work was “just a confirmation” of trends of underrepresentation and underpay for women and minorities. But looking at the numbers, he said, often helps bring those trends into focus.
It’s hard to identify campus trends by looking solely at anecdotal evidence, McChesney told The Chronicle. “You have to look at data and really see what the numbers are, compared to what you what you think an equitable situation should be.”
The factors that lead to women of color’s disadvantage in the higher-ed labor market are complicated. Tisdale pointed to what she called individual “risk analysis” as one. Women in general — but women of color in particular — have often been taught that “if you have an opportunity to get your foot in the door, you don’t demand a lot of things,” Tisdale said. “The questions that you ask are safe questions. So when it comes down to things like salary negotiations, sometimes folks will settle.”
‘Shut Out of Certain Jobs’
Kevin Miller, a senior researcher at the American Association of University Women, calls these inequities the “power-prestige gap.”
The decision makers who guide colleges are “predominantly white men — still not women and not men of color, and not, especially, women of color,” Miller said. Colleges must confront the problem of direct bias, he said, as well as “the fact and the ways in which women and people of color are shut out of certain jobs or aren’t given the tools or the pathways to advance to certain kinds of jobs.”
Ryan Nunn, an economic-studies fellow at the Brookings Institution and policy director of its Hamilton Project, said that the economic implications of inequity for women of color in higher ed — which he said parallel those in the labor force at large — are significant.
“It matters quite a bit for economic activity that we make the right policy choices here and that we make sure that women and people of color have all of the opportunities that white men do,” Nunn said. “About a quarter of the economic growth over the last 50 years is actually associated with the declining barriers to the labor market for women and people of color. Though we certainly haven’t gotten to a place where there is anything like equity, things have improved somewhat, and that improvement has boosted the economy.”
Increasing pay and representation for women of color, Mosley Austin said, won’t come through sheer individual effort.
“We can’t, as women of color, network and mentor our way out of this problem entirely,” she said. “There have to be structural changes that occur on top of that for any of this to change.”
Without change, warns Chandra Childers, the gender-race gap will compound itself. Childers, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, worries especially about representation.
“That cycle, if there’s no intervention, it will continue to repeat itself, because the next cohort of young women who come through won’t have anybody they can look to as role models, or who they can identify with well enough to receive the mentorship that they need.”
