Good morning, and welcome to Friday, January 12. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.
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Prime jobs and prime pay aren’t shared equally
Who holds higher ed’s top jobs? Who’s paid best? The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, or CUPA-HR, recently updated several datasets with survey results from the 2022-23 academic year that help us answer such questions.
The results aren’t pretty. Colleges “still struggle to make meaningful progress” toward equity, CUPA-HR found.
Among administrators: Women are underrepresented in top positions, continuing a stubborn trend over the years. According to the survey data, women were 53.4 percent of all administrators but just 48.2 percent of chief academic officers and 30.3 percent of presidents.
- Women of color are even less well represented among administrators. They were 10.8 percent of all administrators but just 9.2 percent of chief academic officers and 6 percent of presidents.
- The share of racial and ethnic minorities in administrative roles hasn’t kept pace with the demographics of those earning graduate degrees, even as it has risen over time, CUPA-HR noted.
- Pay disparities haven’t improved with any consistency over the years. The median pay ratio for women administrators was lower than that for men in almost all racial and ethnic groups. Only Asian women earned more than white men did. Men of color tended to make more than did white men, however.
Among faculty members: Women and people of color are overrepresented in positions of lower rank and with low pay. Women held a higher share of non-tenure-track faculty positions than tenure-track roles. On the tenure track, women were 52.6 percent of all assistant professors but just 35.9 percent of full professors. People of color were 34.9 percent of assistant professors but 21.7 percent of full professors.
- Pay gaps persist, especially for women of color in non-tenure-track positions. That’s true even as pay gaps for assistant and associate professors shrank over the years.
For professional positions: The share of women employees has increased. Women made up 61 percent of those in professional positions, up from 58 percent in 2017, due in part to gains in women of color. But women of all races and ethnicities received less pay than did men in similar positions.
At the staff level: People of color hold a higher share of staff positions than they do positions in any of the other employee groups. Staff positions pay less than others do. And women staffers are paid less than white men.
That doesn’t mean no progress has been made. The share of administrative jobs held by racial and ethnic minorities increased from 13.7 percent in 2016 to 18.7 percent in the last academic year, for example. And 34.9 percent of assistant professors on the tenure track were people of color, up from 24.6 percent six years ago.
But the data and recent news show a continued uphill climb for work-force equality. It shouldn’t escape notice that all three of the college presidents hauled before a hostile congressional committee last month were women who’d been in their jobs for a relatively short time. All-too-common racist and sexist vitriol can prevent qualified people from taking prominent positions.
- “If I were to advise leaders, who hold marginalized identities, on the presidency,” Jorge Burmicky, an assistant professor of higher-education leadership and policy studies at Howard University, recently told our Eric Kelderman, “I’d say they should consider these positions with a lot of caution.”
The bigger picture: The latest employment data is a reminder that colleges are constantly fighting to uphold ideals like representing diverse communities, offering them career opportunities, and providing equal pay.
