The Gender Pay Gap of Higher Education
The world of politics is full of controversy, but few topics divide opinions more than the gender pay gap.
The world of politics is full of controversy, but a few specific topics divide opinions more than the rest. The gender pay gap has entered a strange realm of discussion, putting it in a position where everyone has an opinion, and it’s always one of two extremes. Either you believe that for every dollar a man is paid, a woman earns 79 cents, or you’re convinced its all a hoax. As usual, the truth lies in between, relying on which statistic you want to focus on and how you want to use it.
The “79 cents for each dollar” statistic has perhaps run its course. Generally accepted as a misleading explanation of the issue primarily brought to light by the Democratic party as a campaign slogan. Every year in April, equal pay day is supposed to represent the additional time a woman would have to work in order to make up the full salary that a man would earn in the previous year. I’ve purposefully left out the phrase “average man” and “average woman”, because honestly a large proportion of those promulgating this specific notion do not use those phrases either. However, the majority have now come to see the true meaning of the statistic, which is much better expressed as a “gender wage gap”.
The figures originate from taking the yearly earnings of the average man and the average woman, regardless of industry, not company specific, just the nationwide US average. Since this doesn’t directly translate to a man and woman being paid a different wage for the same job — something that has remained illegal for decades in the United States — many dismiss the entire conversation as pointless and dishonest. Seemingly attempts by activists to frame the issue in as extreme a way as possible have led to difficulty in returning to the original, still important, findings of the research.
Even if we can agree that the averages bring forward lifetime wage earnings rather than hourly salary, this raises questions about how women’s upbringing could lead them into different, lower-paying jobs. The male domination of industries like engineering and computer science remain an important observation, as well as the prevalence — or lack — of paid maternity leave.
As of 2018, the overall gender pay gap in the UK was 8.6% among full-time employees, while in the same year, universities had a 13.7% pay gap on average.
Higher education has been an especially troubling offender. The United Kingdom government recently conducted research, as well as enacted new laws, to require better transparency of companies gender pay gap figures. As of 2018, the overall gender pay gap in the UK was 8.6% among full-time employees, while in the same year, universities had a 13.7% pay gap on average. My university, Lancaster University, disclosed a whopping 27.7% gap.
While this figure has been available for a while, a number of students at the university recently became aware of this thanks to a pro-active politics lecturer, and began a guerrilla marketing campaign using stickers to try and draw attention to the shocking figure. Others pressuring both the university staff and the students union to enforce a turnaround strategy, but most seem oblivious to the facts that may underlie such a drastically higher number than the national average.
Consider the highest paid members of staff at a university. It’s obviously going to be professors and lecturers, who will make the biggest impact on the wage statistics given their large proportion of the organisation’s employee expenses. Now consider the educational stepping stones that lead to this sort of position.
First they chose to pursue lower-education with enough dedication to graduate, achieving good enough grades to get to college. Then pick a major, each of which having different tendencies to lead into academia rather than work. Following that, perform well enough to pursue a masters degree. After procuring yet another signed certificate for many thousands of dollars, you guessed it, time to get that PhD. Now it’s time for employment, either in corporate or academia, but notorious enough to give you some clout when you finally end up in a junior lecturing position, before finally, you’re looking at becoming a full professor.
While none of these steps are gender specific by nature — although there are statistics to suggest different tendencies to pursue further education of work vary with many factors, including gender — they are all steps that take quite a lot of time. They set the foundations for something you probably already imagine when I mentioned professors in the first place, a grey haired, perhaps balding, older man. You can give your imagination a pat on the back this time, as the European University Institute has found that the average age for a full professor in the United States is no less than 55. You can of course translate that to mean that the average birth year of a university professor is 1964.
Now the gap becomes much clearer. While the average workforce age, depending on the source, comes out in the 40’s, universities wage samples are heavily skewed with older higher paid employees. Subsequently, we need to consider the social politics around gender in place in the 60’s and 70’s, the years in which your average professor grew up. In the decade that gave us ads like the one below, is it any surprise that women of this generation didn’t consider academia as a career option?
It’s important not to dismiss the findings of the higher-education gender pay gap transparency as being unimportant, we do need to look at them in context. Those campaigning to force universities to implement gender pay gap turnaround plans are going to have an unintended effect, putting universities in a position of choosing someone other than the best candidate.
That’s an idea that draws a lot of criticism on its own, also because of understanding. People assume that this implies a woman is a worse candidate than a man, but of course, this is not the case. It just means that the upbringing of men and women in the generation in which the majority of professors were born, brings a much higher pool of male academics looking for lecturing and professor positions than female academics, making for a skew towards a male dominated work force when picking the best candidate.
We should keep a keen eye on the higher-education statistics, ensuring the pay gap shrinks year on year rather than growing. But we must ultimately accept that it is a lagging indicator of society’s attitudes towards gender, perhaps suggesting it could take until 2074 to see higher-education pay gaps as low as the current workforce-wide pay gap, as the children of today grow up in our more equal and understanding society.
