A recently released Statistics Canada report showed U of T to have the widest gap in average salaries between male and female full-time faculty members in Canada, amounting to some $20,158.
The research paper was based on figures from the 2008-2009 academic year, surveying “full-time teaching staff in degree-granting institutions who are under contract for twelve months or more,” including all ranks and disciplines.
Sara-Jane Finlay, director of Faculty and Academic Life at U of T, called the $20,000 figure “a very blunt analysis,” arguing it was not representative of the effective difference in male and female salaries.
“The biggest problems are that there isn’t a distinction made by discipline where there are vastly huge variations in average starting salaries, and in rank, so when you clump all those things together and you’re including in your analysis someone who’s in the humanities who’s just starting out and someone who’s been here for 30 years, is a full professor and works in engineering, management or law, you’ll end up with a massive difference,” says Finlay.
There are two mechanisms by which salaries get increased at U of T. One is an “across the board” increase, usually between 2-3 percent, and the other is “based on merit” — faculty reviews, publications, and the like. “There is no gender dimension to merit,” said Finlay — she therefore attributed the wage discrepancy to two factors.
“The majority of our senior faculty are men and that reflects the demographics of hiring 30 years ago, and the market salary in male-dominated disciplines tends to be significantly higher than the market salary in female-dominated disciplines.”
Finlay stressed that the salaries are “not something [U of T] necessarily sets,” but based on “what universities across North America would offer.”
“Those ones that tend to have higher salaries tend to be in disciplines that are male-dominated: engineering, computer science, management, business, law; those sorts of areas, and the disciplines that traditionally have lower salaries tend to be the ones that are dominated by women, so the humanities, education, some parts of the health sector. So that’s a huge difference right there and that’s an effect of the market,” said Finlay.
Though Finlay couldn’t say why the higher-paid disciplines are male-dominated, calling it “a huge societal question,” she claimed it was changing, with young women entering higher education at unprecedented rates, “so there are more women to become faculty members than there ever were before. I don’t know why there weren’t more women in engineering 20 years ago,” said Finlay. “Now there are.”
As the university has expanded its faculty, they have hired more women — last year, some 50 percent of new faculty hires were female — and Finlay claimed “we’re doing really well in that regard,” maintaining that “if you were to compare like with like — looking at those assistant professors with their starting salaries in the same discipline — you wouldn’t find that kind of difference. If you were to look at man and women in the humanities with same rank there would be very little difference in their salaries.”
Finlay attributed the increased proportion of female faculty to a wider pool of applicants, reflecting U of T’s “proactive recruitment” — trying to ensure they have applicants from a wide variety of backgrounds.
She also noted U of T’s “family-friendly policies,” such as year-long parental leave, childcare and eldercare benefits, and the university’s Family Care Office as contributing elements in the increasingly female faculty.
“It makes it possible for women to work in academia, and we don’t see the opting-out that you do in other industries, or off-ramping it’s called — where women leave in order to have some time for childcare and rarely come back, either at rank or the level or responsibility that they had before. We don’t see that. People leave for childcare and continue to move through the ranks.”
Finlay attributes U of T having the widest discrepancy in Canada to its size and variety of disciplines. “I believe we offer the most varied mix of courses in Canada,” said Finlay, “and so we have the widest range, so other universities that may not have the full range will have a narrower band of salary difference… People who don’t have engineering and law or management won’t have the salary differences we have.”
