Sex differentials in faculty salaries

Abstract

Affirmative action and other efforts to combat sex discrimination in higher education have focused on rank and salary differences within institutions. Academic women, however, tend to receive relatively low pay in part because they are concentrated in the lower-paying institutions. Since multivariate controls of factors such as institutional type, control, size, selectivity, and curricular emphases do not eliminate this negative relationship, the hypothesis of a direct link between institutional pay scales and faculty sex ratios is strengthened. These results suggest that eliminating sex bias in faculty pay within individual institutions will not achieve salary parity for academic women until higher-paying institutions recruit more women faculty, or until institutions with higher proportions of women faculty upgrade their pay scales.