Alexandra Kostakis, a professor of entrepreneurial practice in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, was unsurprised to learn that women faculty earned less on average than men at Syracuse University. And she wasn’t alone.
“I don’t think I was surprised at all by it,” said Yvonne Smith, an assistant professor in the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics.
“Honestly, my reaction was that I was not surprised at all,” said Jennifer Stromer-Galley, a professor in the School of Information Studies.
“Disappointed, but not surprised,” said Lindsay Harkema, an assistant teaching professor in the School of Architecture.
“I’m not surprised at all,” said Brad Gorham, an associate professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
“I’m not surprised by the findings,” said Tina Nabatchi, an associate professor in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
There’s a gender wage gap across all of academia, faculty said. It’s been previously reported at SU. It’s present in the industries faculty worked in before they became educators.
“We all knew it,” Kostakis said. “This isn’t something new. Everyone in the world sort of knows this.”
A 2017 faculty salary report, compiled by a University Senate committee tasked with determining whether salary trends were equitable and competitive in the past four years, revealed in December that women professors at SU earned less on average than men. The gender wage gap existed university-wide, the report found, and fluctuated in severity depending on the school or college.
To understand the report’s impact, The Daily Orange interviewed dozens of faculty members across every school and college at the university. Those faculty included women, men, professors of practice, assistant professors, associate professors, full professors, department chairs, deans, women of color, men of color, faculty hired about six months ago and faculty hired decades ago.
Only in one school, the College of Arts and Sciences, did the report find that women professors earned more than men, on average. And it was only at the lowest professor level of tenure-track faculty that the report found no statistically significant gender wage gaps.
The report’s regression analysis found that gender pay gaps university-wide were statistically and economically significant, even after controlling for variables such as academic area, years of experience and years of seniority. The report noted, though, that it didn’t have access to all variables that could contribute to faculty salaries, including teaching performance.
No statistically significant wage gaps were identified along racial lines.
Some groups, such as full professors in Whitman and the School of Architecture, included so few women that the salary gap could not be analyzed.
“I guess that’s just the way of the world,” Kostakis said.
Institutional inequality
Francine D’Amico, an associate professor of international relations who used to serve on Chancellor Kent Syverud’s Workgroup on Diversity and Inclusion, had heard of frustrations about the gender pay gap and a lack of women leadership for years.
“I received numerous complaints from women faculty here at Syracuse, complaining about differential salaries, differential treatment, different standards for promotion or becoming chairs of departments,” D’Amico said. “And that was across the university.”
D’Amico said she feels women at SU are not given the same opportunities for promotion as men, nor are they advancing up the bureaucratic ladder into leadership positions in the same numbers as men.
Multiple faculty, including D’Amico, said they felt women are more likely to hold jobs in service positions, such as undergraduate directors.
Of Maxwell’s department chairs, which D’Amico said are considered executive or administrative positions, eight out of 11 are men.
Men dominate the makeup of department-level leadership, even outside of Maxwell, a D.O. analysis found. There’s gender parity among academic deans — six women and six men lead the university’s 12 schools and colleges — but men are overwhelmingly in charge of academic departments.
Men outnumber women about 2 to 1 in department leadership at SU, according to various university websites.
Details about the knowledge and influence most SU department chairs have over their faculty member’s salaries is unclear. The Daily Orange contacted more than two dozen department chairs, and only two agreed to comment on this story. Gorham, chair of Newhouse’s communications department, was one of them.
Gorham said he doesn’t have access to his professors’ salaries, and has no idea what they make. The dean has that information, he said. But Gorham does read teaching evaluations, or reviews of professors that students write at the end of each semester.
Teaching evaluations and performance, outside job offers and length of service can all be partial factors in determining whether a professor gets a raise.
On reviews of “tough” men professors, Gorham said students may generally call them “tough coaches,” who push students to do better. The feedback is different for tough women, Gorham said.
“People use nasty words to describe them and don’t show them nearly as much respect,” he said.
Gorham said he’s had to remind tenure review committees that women are more harshly evaluated by students than men. And he’s had to argue on behalf of women faculty to remind their review committees the effect a person’s gender could have on their reviews.
“Tenure review committees aren’t compensating in a sense in their thinking about the fact that female faculty are more likely to be dinged in their teaching evaluations by students than male faculty,” he said.
Teaching evaluations, at least in Newhouse, are one determinant in whether or not a professor gets tenure, or whether or not the university will give salary raises to retain them when they get job offers from other schools.
Not all departments noted discrepancies in teaching evaluations, though.
Ramesh Raina, chair of the biology department, said the women and men professors he leads tend to receive similar teaching evaluations. Unlike Gorham, Raina has access to faculty salaries in the biology department and said they are paid equitably regardless of gender.
His department has hired primarily women faculty in the last several years, he said. There were no conscious decisions to hire women, but he said good faculty who happened to be women “rose to the top.”
Roughly 46 percent of the biology department is composed of women faculty, according to its website.
Jacqueline Bichsel, director of research at the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, said women on average are underrepresented at every level of university leadership, including the faculty, department chair and administrative levels. Based on her research, she said, there’s no causal explanation for the wage gap, and anyone who thinks they can explain it is just “blowing smoke.”
“Really, the explanation that … seems to make the most sense is that we value women less,” Bichsel said. “Nobody is intending to pay women less, but it happens and it’s been happening for decades now.”
Implicit bias against women, Bichsel said, could be a reason why women are not paid equally in academia.
“We should rise above those kind of nationwide biases and fix things,” said Can Isik, a professor in the College of Engineering and Computer Science. “We should be able to.
“Universities and colleges are supposed to be enlightened places, right?”
A wage gap, visible for years
“I had already heard in the past about the pay disparity between departments,” said Farhana Sultana, an associate professor in Maxwell.
Committee Z, a now-defunct annual report published by the SU chapter of a higher education advocacy group, had for decades noted a gender salary gap among professors at SU.
During the 2011-12 academic year, the last time Committee Z compared women and men faculty salary data university-wide, the report found that women who were full professors made 91 percent what men did in their respective positions. Women who were associate professors made 93 percent of men’s wages, and women assistant professors made 96 percent.
The final Committee Z report, compiled with data from the 2012-13 academic year, did not compare women’s salary as a percentage of men’s university-wide.
In 2014, SU stopped releasing the data that allowed university faculty and the American Association of University Professors, the advocacy organization, to analyze pay gaps and salary trends. Syverud, in a letter to SU’s AAUP chapter president, said there were legal concerns regarding the sharing of faculty salary data.
The pay gap found in historic Committee Z reports continued even after the university chose not to disclose the data.
Joanna Masingila, dean of the School of Education, worked with the Committee Z report in the last years of its publication. She said she remembered “one or two schools” receiving money to balance wage gaps some time during Kenneth “Buzz” Shaw’s tenure as chancellor from 1991 to 2004.
Beyond that, it’s unclear whether SU took specific steps — or any steps — at the time to remedy the pay gap across the university after the Committee Z report releases.
LaVonda Reed, SU’s vice president for faculty affairs, was not made available for an interview for this story. She said in an email the Committee Z report was “important and useful” but had no specific recommendations.
It takes money to give people raises, Masingila said. Money the university might not be able to spend without siphoning funds from other areas.
“We’re all working with finite resources,” Masingila said.
Climate for change
Carmen Carrión-Flores, a research assistant professor in Maxwell, said the faculty salary report leaves her with more questions. The report’s analysis, which did not account for factors affecting pay such as career path and academic performance, should be taken with a grain of salt, she said. Marital status, number of children and parent education are more detailed socio-demographic variables that could have been included in the report, she added in a follow-up email.
Once those factors are controlled, Carrión-Flores said she would expect the wage gap to shrink.
Masingila said she has overheard similar sentiments, including “brief mentions” that the report’s methodology may be problematic.
Regardless of how the committee analyzed salary data, university leadership are responding to its findings.
Masingila said the deans are working in “very good faith” to see their faculty’s salaries reflect their worth, and she said she feels Syverud and Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele Wheatly are taking the faculty salary report seriously.
University administrators have already announced plans to work on remediating the gap in some departments.
Reed said in a January Senate meeting the university will use funds from Invest Syracuse, a $100 million academic initiative, to address the inequities. The university’s goal is to make the necessary salary adjustments so that they take effect in the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that all salaries will change,” Reed said at the meeting. “We should have a realistic expectation.”
Sara Schleicher | Staff Photographer
In another emailed statement, Reed said the university will continue to analyze how the data applies to individual faculty members.
She said deans are reviewing the data to determine salary equity issues and account for faculty contributions through service, teaching, research and other factors.
In a letter emailed to the Maxwell community on Tuesday, Dean David Van Slyke said he and his team are working on a deeper analysis of faculty salaries. Van Slyke said the study will look into variables outside the scope of the initial report, including, among other things, salary differences among disciplines, market forces, performance indicators and outputs.
Reed also said SU will standardize ranks, job titles and job descriptions for non-tenure-track faculty. Those faculty include lecturers, instructors, teaching professors and professors of practice.
And, the university will update personnel files to ensure faculty are listed in the personnel system at the correct rank, Reed added.
An ongoing data analysis in partnership with the University Senate will track the progress of recommendations made by the faculty salary committee in the report, which included correction of the salary gender gap and the standardization of job ranks.
The faculty salary report did not find a statistically significant wage gap at the assistant professor rank, which could suggest that faculty are currently being hired with equitable wages. Craig Boise, dean of the College of Law, said new hires in his school are receiving the same salary regardless of gender.
Many faculty members, such as Tina Nabatchi, the Maxwell professor, said they’re hopeful the pay gap will be addressed. Nabatchi and others said they were happy the university took the time to compile the report and provide the data necessary for deans and administrators to make potential salary adjustment decisions.
“I think people expected this result,” Nabatchi said. “What I will be disappointed in is if there isn’t action to try to bring more equity to the salaries between … male and female and other gendered faculty members.”
But others, including Lori Brown, the architecture professor, said they feel the history of gender pay inequity at the university, and SU’s past inability to successfully address it leaves them skeptical of future fixes.
“I would like to have confidence that it will change,” Brown said. “… But I also don’t want to be naive.”
Brown said conversations among women faculty have started on campus to respond to the report’s findings as a “collective voice.” Though she declined to elaborate on the specifics of the response because the conversations are “still ongoing,” she said many are willing to speak out collectively in response to the pay gap.
Others said they fear that speaking out against the findings of the report could result in punishment or retribution from university leadership.
Brown said friends and colleagues have told her they have concerns there will be retribution for raising the issue of pay inequality, adding that she was surprised by the amount of people who weren’t willing to speak out.
And three women declined to comment on this story because they said they feared retribution from department-level leadership or university administrators.
Jian Qin, a professor in the iSchool who spoke out against the pay gap, initially requested her interview with The D.O. be kept off the record because she feared sharing her thoughts on the salary gap would offend her colleagues. She later agreed to share her thoughts publicly.
Susan Thomas, an assistant professor in the School of Education, also had hesitations. But she ultimately said she wanted to share her thoughts to contribute to public discussions about the wage gap at SU.
“I think there needs to be a conversation that’s had not just privately, behind closed doors,” Thomas said.
Banner graphic illustration by Kateri Gemperlein-Schirm | Design Editor
Published on February 8, 2018 at 12:35 am
Contact Jordan: jmulle01@syr.edu | @jordanmuller18
