All University of British Columbia all full-time, female-identified tenure and tenure-track professors are getting a raise to counteract gendered pay inequity.
The two per cent salary increase, retroactive to July 1, 2010, is part of a three-year process between the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the UBC Faculty Association (UBCFA) to solve pay inequity among full-time tenure-track faculty. The study did not look at pay inequity among UBC academic or administrative support staff.
Inspired by pay equity reports in 2007 and 2009 from UBC's Equity Office, the University and UBCFA created two separate working groups: the DATA Working Group for collecting data on pay equity and the SMART Working Group to devise solutions.
According to a joint message from UBCFA and UBC's two provosts sent to faculty today, the DATA Working Group's "analyses indicated that after accounting for the factors of under representation of females at the full professor level, experience, and differences in the gender balance across departments, a pay differential of 2% remained, that could only be explained by gender. This unexplained female pay disadvantage is considered a systemic discrimination issue."
About 38 per cent of tenure-track UBC faculty identify as female, but only 21 per cent of full professors, who earn higher salaries than assistant or associate professors, are female idenfitied.
UBCFA President Nancy Langton told The Tyee via email that two per cent, or about $3,000, is an average pay gap and the salary increase won't fix all salary inequity.
"It is actually quite difficult to calculate individual differences, given small sample sizes in most cases," she wrote.
"The two percent takes a systemic approach. It will not resolve all salary differences, and it will likely not make all salaries equal."
According to Rachel Kuske, senior advisor to the UBC Provost on Women Faculty, the University is still calculating how much this increase will cost them.
Langton says the University went through a similar process in 1985, and reports from both working groups indicate the experience of 17 other North American universities with ensuring pay equity were considered in this process.
The SMART Working Group has laid out several strategies to ensure pay equity continues, and the University is a comfortable working environment for women in general. According to the email sent to UBC faculty today, these include:
"Starting salaries: ensuring that differences are not due to unconscious bias or other discriminatory practices.
Equity Training: increasing awareness of discriminatory practices or unconscious bias and developing tools and safeguards.
Mentoring: increasing opportunities for connections, peer coaching and facilitation of career advancement.
Working Climate: establishing a mechanism to identify and explore possible areas where the working climate may be an issue for women.
Monitoring: establishing mechanisms for periodic audits of pay equity and best practice implementation."
Back pay and salary readjustments will take place by February 28.
Katie Hyslop reports on education and youth issues for The Tyee. Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/Kehyslop .
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plush32
17 weeks ago
It's about time!
We women have been fighting for p[ay equity for at least 40 years!!
temposetter
17 weeks ago
How on EARTH
Did it take this long for a University to fall in line?
Kreditanstalt
17 weeks ago
Never-never land.
This would never stand if the universities had to show a profit, attract full-fee-payng students and prove their worth. People would be paid, in varying amounts, based on what they're worth to their employer and on what they and their employer had agreed.
That's what's coming: as real economic growth continues to stagnate and both private and government debt levels soar, the relevance of traditional systems of education will be increasingly questioned. Cost-benefit analysis will have to be performed by both potential students and by the governments who fund this nonsense.
Because public sector employees are protected by government from free competition for their positions, strange, otherworldly things can occur...
None of this has any relation whatsoever either to performance or to ability to pay.
And BTW, what is this (politically-correct?) "female identified"...if it walks like a duck and talks like one...
temposetter
17 weeks ago
Kredit
Can you ever say anything that isn't totally ludicrous?
Kreditanstalt
17 weeks ago
@temposetter,
Not often, apparently - HERE.
I just wish that the government manipulation would end and that wages, benefits, pensions and profits could again bear some relation to the free market - as they will be, gradually and of necessity, in the years to come.
Regent
17 weeks ago
UBC ensures pay equity with raise for female profs
Achieve pay equity simply by reducing male compensation by 2%
Frank
17 weeks ago
Kredit
Sure would be nice to see you just once advocate for a higher standard of living instead of cheering the lowering of it.
What anyone in the bottom 90% gain by their standard of living being lowered is beyond me.
Kreditanstalt
17 weeks ago
@Frank
How does paying government employees more, with money taken from others, raise the standard of living of the latter? It lowers it.
And how does taking money out of the private economy and transferring it to government employees encourage the remaining private sector-ites to invest, to accumulate capital and to take job-creating risks?
If the employers of these professors - we, the private sector - had any say at all, things might be quite different.
I think the root difficulty is that collectivists and central planning-types really don't understand how wealth is generated or that "wealth" and "money" are two different beasts...
Frank
17 weeks ago
Kredit
Let go of your straitjacket ideology and look at history.
The redistribution of wealth is necessary to reduce inequality. Reducing inequality creates not only a better society but also a better economy.
The more people that are able to take part in the economy the greater the economic activity.
As should be clear, "free" markets don't work on their own. They atrophy and die. "Free" markets need government intervention.
What it comes down to is that as I've said before, you don't understand how wealth is generated.
You don't read economists who learned from the Great Depression and you don't read economists nowadays who are studying why a male worker in the USA in 1968 had a higher standard of living than a male worker in 2011.
People like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz study this and you either don't read them or simply write them off because its your opinion that nobel-prize winning economists don't understand economics.
Because if your view of economics was true then the lowering of the US male worker's standard of living should have produced a better economy. But it didn't.
You should try and understand why instead of quoting ideology that flies in the face of reality.
Kreditanstalt
17 weeks ago
@Frank
We'll have to agree to differ...no one "wants" a lower standard of living, certainly not to artificially prop up that of others.
And I do find it telling that the standard of living of a male worker in much-freer 1968 was higher than in centrally-planned 2011...
Keynesianism and the social welfare state are in their death throes. IMO.
Anyway, we shall eventually find out. No amount of state economic intervention, planning or redistributing can really make people more equal...so let's just wait for insolvency, OK?
Thins are going in the right direction.
Frank
17 weeks ago
Kredit
1968 America was more "centrally-planned" than 2011.
Unionization was about 5 times greater for one thing. We didn't have free-trade.
Not sure what you think makes today more "centrally-planned".
"Thins are going in the right direction."
That certainly sounds to me like cheering the increase in poverty and the decline of the middle class.
Frank
17 weeks ago
Keynesianism
We haven't had "Keynesianism" for 30 years.
Kreditanstalt
17 weeks ago
???!!!
Frank, you DO come up with mind-bogglingly astounding statements.
Keynesianism is all around us - like The Matrix!
http://www.economicnoise.com/2013/01/21/keynesians-and-ponzians/
Frank
17 weeks ago
Kredit
I don't know what "the Matrix" is, but no.
Way back in the late 70s and early 80s we moved away from Keynesian economics in favour of those championed by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, usually referred to as "monetarism" or "new classical economics".
Its been in all the papers.
Keynesian economics has not been the dominant economic theory since the days of Gordie Howe.
The "death" you're cheering on right now is the spiralling down of monetarism and new classical economics. Also referred to as "free market" economics.
Most of us expect a return to a version of economics based on Keynesian principles once the headstone of "free market economics" has been erected.
Frank
17 weeks ago
Kredit
I will say this has been very illuminating and I now understand the origin of much of your confusion.
Hakuin
16 weeks ago
rejoice serfs!
under the firm hand of the Chairman's helmsman-ship you may now look forward to higher education for your daughters!
http://www.theprovince.com/life/Sugar+daddy+website+offers+struggling+students+education/7857314/story.html