The Board of Visitors’ Committee on Diversity and Inclusion held its inaugural meeting Friday to discuss the results of a study on wages of female faculty at the University.
Economics Prof. Sarah Turner, one of the authors of the study, explained the results to the Visitors.
“After controlling the influence of school, field, rank, years since highest degree and years at U.Va., the average salary of female faculty members at the University of Virginia is about 2.7 percent less than the average salary of a male faculty member,” Turner said.
Turner said the data used in the study came from the administrative and personnel records from the University from all tenured and tenure-track faculty from 2012 and 2013. Faculty from the medical school were not included.
“Our approach was to [analyze] … the different roles of field of specialization, rank and years at the University in determining compensation,” Turner said. “The study investigated whether faculty salary levels were associated with gender, race or citizenship after controlling for these key measures.”
Committee Chair Frank Conner expressed a desire to find more broader trends.
“I’ve done a lot of compensation in law firms and we have found … some unconscious bias, more of supporting mechanisms, getting people equal opportunity necessary to perform on an equal basis,” Conner said. “Clearly we’re focused on gender disparity, but is the sample so small we can’t really focus on other forms of disparity in minorities?”
Turner said the limited number of faculty from different racial and ethnic subgroups impedes the task force’s ability to make inferences about differences in earnings differences in those groups. Unfortunately, she said, the study fails to compare productivity across different fields of study.
Turner also said the study concluded no expected systematic differences in salary between genders for tenured faculty.
Further investigation would include equity review and salary adjustments, and would involve the help of University deans to develop more measurable ways of studying faculty productivity across different fields of study.
“This report represents a starting point rather than an ending point for discussions of equitable determination of compensation across the University, and then its specific academic fields,” Turner said.
