on a Study of Gender and Ethnic - Minority Equity in Faculty

Executive Summary In response to a recommendation from a 2001-02 salary equity committee report and a mandate from the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity (EOD), in order comply with relevant federal requirements, a salary-equity analysis focused on gender and minority status in full-time faculty on the tenured or clinical track was conducted using 2004-05 data. This report presents the method and results of that study. Based on the literature, six factors that have been shown to affect faculty salaries had been identified previously (in the 2001-02 report): college/department, type of terminal degree (e.g., master's, " PhD-type " doctorate, health-sciences doctorate), years since obtaining terminal degree (as a way of measuring seniority), tenure status, faculty rank, and administrative experience. In the current analyses, at the request of EOD, administrators were removed from the data set, necessitating that that factor be removed from the analyses. Moreover, also at the request of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity (EOD), the data were analyzed in three groups: academic-year (9-month) tenured-and-tenure-track (AT) faculty, fiscal-year (12-month) tenured-and-tenure-track (FT) faculty, and fiscal-year (12-month) clinical-track faculty. As was found in the earlier salary study, most faculty salary variation—regardless of track or whether the appointment is based on the academic or fiscal year—was due to the five factors that are known and expected to affect salary, specifically: discipline (college/ department), type of terminal academic degree (e.g., masters' degree; health-science doctoral degree), seniority (number of years since obtaining terminal degree), tenure status, and faculty rank. These variables accounted for all but approximately 20% of faculty salary variation, and when these five factors were taken into account, there were no overall statistically significant gender-or minority-status based salary differences in any of the three faculty groups. The bulk of salary variation was due to departmental differences in salaries (e.g., faculty in Finance earn more than those in Classics; faculty in Neurosurgery earn more than those in Preventive & Community Dentistry). When this departmental variation was not considered, some significant differences based on gender, and a few on minority status, were found, which suggests that, in particular, women faculty are more likely to be in departments that have lower overall salaries. Test of this hypothesis were strongly supported for gender. For example, in the academic tenure-track, broadly speaking, faculty in the Arts and Humanities were roughly 50% women and earned the least, those in the Social Sciences had one-third women and …