Reverses in Gender Salary Gaps Among STEM Faculty: Evidence from Mean and Quantile Decompositions

Abstract

Abstract This research examines the gender salary gap in STEM and nonSTEM disciplines at a public research university. We estimate earnings regressions for female and White male faculty members as a whole as well as for those working in STEM departments. Controlling for productive characteristics and field salary differentials, we perform mean and quantile decomposition analyses to identify potential salary inequities. We observe no gender salary gap for analyses of mean or median monthly salary. However, our salary quantile analyses for STEM departments indicate there are positive effects for women in top quantiles and negative effects for women in low quantiles compared to White male peers, other things equal. This implies that highly paid female academics working in STEM departments were better rewarded than their White male peers, but female academics at the lower end of the salary distribution were not paid on par with their White male peers.