Gender and Faculty Pay in Canada

Abstract

Abstract. Analysis of a 1986 survey of Canadian university faculty shows that the overall in pay is $8,500 per year. Accounting for male faculty's being older, on average, and level of highest degree, the -- our estimate of discrimination -- is $4,910 per year. Discriminatory processes of promotion account for much of the gap. In addition, the is much greater for full professors than for women at lower ranks. Universities and disciplines differ considerably in pay, but the uneven distribution of women among institutions and disciplines does not disadvantage women. Also, research productivity has little impact on pay or the gap. The findings are consistent with a bureaucratic model of pay determination, rather than human capital and segmentation approaches. Resume. Un sondage des professeurs universitaires au Canada en 1986 montre un ecart de 8 500$ par annee antre les salaires moyens des femmes et des hommes. Tenant compte de l'age et du niveau du diplome le plus avence, notre calcul de l'effet de descrimination est de 4 910$ par annee. L'ecart est beaucoup plus grand pour les professeurs titulaires que pour les niveaux inferieurs. Les universites et les disciplines ont differents niveaux de salaire, mais la distribution des femmes et des hommes parmi les universites et les disciplines ne desavantage pas les femmes. En plus, la productivite des chercheurs n'a qu'un effet faible sur les salaires et sur l'ecart entre les femmes et les hommes. Ces resultats soutiennent un modele bureaucratique de la determination des salaires, plutot que les modeles fondes sur les concepts du captial humain ou sur la segmentation. Introduction The gender gap in pay results from a combination of institutional factors, such as differences in the representation of women in occupations and industries and in the prevalence of part-time employment, and in individual differences in education and training, seniority, and so on. Even after accounting for the skills and other characteristics of workers, occupations employing larger proportions of women tend to pay lower wages (England, et al., 1988; Fox and Fox, 1986; Stanek-Kilbourne, et al., 1994; Tolbert, 1986). Because of the complexity of the occupational structure and the strong relationships between the characteristics of employers and individuals, case studies of relatively homogeneous work environments can provide important insights into the mechanisms of pay determination that are obscured in broader studies of the labour force. This article presents such a case study of the pay of full-time university faculty in Canada. The relatively similar bureaucratic structures of universities and the national market for academic labour produce uniformity in both general patterns and differences in pay. Relative to employment in private industries dominated by large firms, full-time academic work in universities has a highly standardized, very flat rank structure (essentially three ranks) and a fairly uniform structure of faculties and departments. Academic employment is segmented along both organizational and occupational lines. Even within provinces, universities have their own pay structure, and the unions and associations representing faculty are also independent. As a result, there are, potentially, pay differences between individual universities, related to their size, prestige, and historical experience; and between universities in different provinces. Simultaneously, university faculty are segmented into many academic specialties whose work is not interchangeable. While our main concern in this paper is with the effect of on pay, measuring and interpreting the impact of requires a model of faculty wage structure that explains pay differences in general. In the next section, we discuss the models, then we present a statistical analysis of faculty pay, based on a 1986 survey of Canadian faculty, conducted for Professor Jos Lennards by the Institute for Social Research at York University. …