By Angela Speck
April 10th 2018 is “Equal Pay Day”. It is the day
in 2018 that women have to work until to earn the same as
men did in 2017. In fact, this
isn’t even a true statement. For women of color Equal Pay day is later in the
year: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/equal-pay-day-is-not-equal-at-all-for-women-of-color_us_58e3ec04e4b09deecf0e1af4.
In 2016, white women earned 77 cents on the dollar compared to what men earned;
African American women earned 64 cents on the dollar and Hispanic women only earned
56 cents on the dollar. Within academia in the US, women earn 80 cents on the dollar:https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/.
As a white woman, and a woman with a
tenured position, I acknowledge my privilege amongst women. I am sharing my
story about pay and gender inequity knowing that it could be worse.
Last year, on Equal Pay Day 2017, I sent
the (male) chair of my department an email regarding my pay compared to that of
a colleague. It’s always difficult to compare faculty salaries. Our paths to
tenure and promotion are all different. Our research topics are always at least
somewhat different, so making a direct comparison is tricky. But I happen to
have a story in which we come as close as ever to direct comparison.
Back in 2004 I became a tenure track assistant professor at
Mizzou (I’d been here as a “visiting assistant prof” for the 2 years prior to
that). A male colleague in the same department and the same sub-discipline (our
research is very close, although he is a theorist and I’m an observer) also
became a tenure-track assistant professor in 2004. We started on exactly the
same salary. We are the same age (to within less than a year). We got our PhDs
at about the same time, and from similarly prestigious institutions. We get
invited to the same conferences. This is as good as it gets when comes to
comparing track records in academia.
Thirteen years after our arrival (on EPD2017) he was earning
>20% more than me despite the fact that I got tenure a year before him and I
have been a full professor for a year longer. How do we explain to difference
in our salaries?
In the time up to EPD2017, my colleague had certainly
published more papers than me and has a higher h-index, but I had brought in at
least as much grant money. I had also received a prestigious NSF CAREER award;
he had not. I had graduated 4 PhDs and 6 masters’ students, to his 1 PhD
student. In addition to research and student training, I developed our
astronomy program, which was built from nothing to a minor in astronomy and an
astronomy emphasis for physics majors. I developed a bunch of courses and a
huge outreach program. I have also advised more undergrad researchers than any
member of faculty in my dept. in this period (possibly ever!). My colleague
antagonized students, did a poor job of teaching and zero outreach. I have even
mentored his students.
As evidence of my contributions to our institution, I have
won campus-level awards for excellence in research (2008), teaching (2013) and
service (for diversity work, 2016). He has not won any such awards. I have
served on several college- and campus-level committees including in leadership roles.
He has not. I have been an elected member of the AAS council, as well as a
member of the congressionally appointed Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory
Committee, demonstrating my commitment to providing leadership in our field. He
has not.
On the other hand, he has done things that could potentially
embarrass our department. He has simply not shown up to conferences to which he
was invited and agreed to speak. I even had to intervene in his teaching of
tides in the non-majors’ astronomy class; he clearly did not understand how
tides work. When I mentioned these issues to various faculty colleagues prior
to his promotion to full professor, I was told to keep my mouth shut. It was
clear that my (male) colleague thought I was a bad actor for mentioning his bad
behavior, rather than a whistleblower concerned about the reputation of my
department.
After I complained about the disparity in pay I was given an
“extraordinary” pay raise. For several years now we haven’t had pay raises,
except for those that have special need. Even with the 10% raise in my pay I
still earn 10% less than my colleague.
Because of austerity measures on campus, our chair decided
he needed to discuss the extraordinary pay raises in a faculty meeting. This is
to be commended; transparency is good. However, he appended a comment about how
there is no gender gap in the
salaries in our department. This is a weird thing to say. As a
public/state-supported institution our salaries are public. You can look here
to search the databases: http://graphics.stltoday.com/apps/payrolls/salaries/31_75/ (This data is for 2016-17, prior to my pay raise). Now if you look at salaries
for my department – the only way the you can select a sample in which there
isn’t a gender gap is to take all the tenured and tenure-track faculty
together. But there are no female faculty members below the rank of professor,
so this sample artificially reduces the average for men. Amongst the full
professor, there are a few “distinguished” professors which will also skew the
sample. Amongst full professors who are not “distinguished”, there is a 5%
difference between the median salary for women and for men. I was earning more
than 10% below the median for women, the colleague I am comparing to was
earning 5% above the median for men. In fact, I was earning the median salary
for all women in the department (the women faculty are dominated by lower paid
teaching faculty), whereas my colleague was earning nearly 8% above the median
for all men in the department. I confess I may have gotten a little obsessed
with the numbers, but when your chairperson refuses to discuss the issue with
you and then declares publicly that there isn’t a gender-related pay gap, and
that anyone who thinks there is a gap is deluded, the desire to dig into this
stuff is overwhelming.
Why am I sharing all of this minutiae about my salary woes?
It’s equal pay day. There are lots of articles about how the gender pay gap
remains a problem: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00113-6
and https://www.chronicle.com/article/Gender-Pay-Gap-Persists-Across/239553.
But our colleagues will deny that it happens on their watch and in their
departments. They will even try to use statistics to prove it (to themselves,
to us, to the outside world). Gaslighting is a problem in academia, just as it
is elsewhere. They will say that we cannot compare faculty salaries because our
paths are all different. They will point to the h-index, but not to the
awards. They will claim that there is no
bias. They will claim that the disparities occur because of retentions packages
(seriously – like it doesn’t occur to them that only the men are getting these
packages to keep them).
That brings me to a slightly different but related topic:
spousal hiring. Full disclosure: I am a spousal hire! My department has done
exceeding well from spousal hiring. At one point we had six couples amongst the
faculty members in our department (we still have 5 couples); and there are two
of us with partners who are faculty in other departments. In a six-year period
we received 5 career awards, with four of the five being recipients being one
half of a spousal arrangement. We have done very well out of spousal hiring.
However, most of the “trailing” spouses are the women (myself included). The
one case where the spousal deal was bringing the man into the department was an
odd case (he was transferring his faculty line from a different campus within
our university system). We recently lost one of our best women faculty because
we wouldn’t offer her husband a job. In the past, when existing or prospective
faculty have requested a job for their spouse/partner, we have always discussed
it as a faculty in a meeting. In this case, our chair did not see fit to bring
the question to the faculty as a whole. In fact, most of the faculty are
unaware of why she left. Why is it that male faculty can ask to bring in their
wives and get taken seriously, while female faculty are essentially dismissed
out of hand and told it isn’t worth our time?
Again – why am I sharing all of this? Because we need to
share our stories. We need to know that we aren’t alone in dealing with gender
bias. And maybe in sharing we can prevent history for repeating.
Don’t let the patriarchy get you down.
