A new study finds that women STEM professors receive less compensation advantages from being ... [+]
A new study of more than 3,ooo university faculty has found that tenure-track women working in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields receive smaller salary increases associated with their research productivity than do men.
The research paper entitled, Higher Research Productivity = More pay? Gender Pay-for-Productivity Inequity Across Disciplines, was conducted by a team of investigators currently at the University of Houston, the University of California Merced and the University of Colorado, Boulder. It’s been conditionally accepted for publication in the refereed journal Scientometrics, a journal dedicated to the study of measuring scientific progress and capturing how scientists’ careers evolve.
Ideally, faculty who produce more influential research publications should receive more favorable evaluations and larger pay raises, which at many research universities are based in large part on faculty’s research productivity. And in a fair system, the relationship between higher pay and greater research productivity should be the same for men and women professors.
In order to see if this was the case, the research team, led by Christiane Spitzmueller, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and Strategy at the University of California, Merced; Charissa Samaniego, a doctoral student at the time of the study; and Peggy Lindner, Assistant Professor of Information Technology at the University of Houston, examined publication and citation data for 3,033 STEM and social science professors affiliated with 17 top public research universities, each one with Carnegie Classifications as R1 Universities, the highest level of research activity. All the faculty were tenured or tenure-eligible, and their publication data were taken from their Google Scholar websites.
The researchers used a widely accepted measure of faculty research productivity, impact and reputation, called the h index, which combines the number of articles a faculty member has published (a measure of quantity) with the number of times those articles are cited (a measure of impact and reputation).
The researchers found that overall the average salaries of their sample were $133,092 for men and $118,459 for women; in other words, among these faculty, women made about 89 cents on the dollar made by men. And the average h index was also higher for men, ranging from 5.32 to 8.33 points higher than for women.
After statistically controlling for a number of variables such as the length of time since the faculty member’s Ph.D. was earned and the average salary of the department with which each was affiliated, the researchers found that pay-for-productivity did not differ significantly between men and women researchers in the social sciences.
However, things were very different when looking at STEM faculty. There, women fared far worse than men when comparing how much salary advantage they gained from being productive researchers. On average, in STEM disciplines, men were paid $266.66 more than women for each one-point increment in the h-index.
So while both men and women STEM researchers’ salaries increase as they produce more influential research, the relationship is much more strongly positive for the men.
Those differences become particularly pronounced if we look at the most highly performing researchers - think of them as the research “stars.” Women STEM researchers with an h-index of 49 (one standard deviation above the mean) made around $6,000 less than men researchers in STEM with the same h-index.
Simply multiplying that difference by 30 years - a reasonable estimate of the length of a faculty career - yields a cumulative difference of $180,000. But depending on their career trajectory, a highly productive woman researcher in STEM might experience even more pay inequity, as the authors observe.
Gender differences in college faculty compensation, promotion and other rewards are nothing new. They have been confirmed by many investigators examining various academic disciplines. What this paper adds is evidence of a new form of inequity - research prowess is not equally rewarded for men and women faculty in STEM fields.
Explaining these differences is another challenge, but a better understanding of the factors that contribute to the gendered outcomes might help moderate them in the future. For one, men are more likely to serve as department chairs, deans and faculty evaluation committee members in the STEM fields, while women enjoy a more equal proportion of leadership positions in the social sciences. Another factor is that the STEM disciplines employ more men as faculty members and have done so for longer, giving them a career - and probably a reputational - edge.
Whatever the contributions, the consequences of the pay difference for STEM women in academia on their motivation, performance and retention are profound and need to be addressed by policy makers and at the institutional level. Leveling the pay-for-productivity playing field is in order. As lead author, Christiane Spitzmueller, told me, “Unless women and minorities see the same rewards for the same level of performance, we continue to undervalue their contributions and their work’s worth.”
