There was a great article by Sandra Schmidt on the Sun on Friday, but you can't access it unless you subscribe.

Basically, the article reports the findings by a new Stats Can study that finds that the wage gap between male and female faculty members at Canadian universities can be as high as $17, 575.

One university spokesperson tried to argue that this gap is simply the result of comparing faculty salaries from different disciplines - for example, engineering and science departments are dominated by men and tend to pay more. (Surprise, surprise, women are overrepresented in the arts, a discipline that is undervalued by society as a whole). But someone from a women's organization countered that this study merely reflects the wage gap in Canada at large and is based on sexism, pure and simple.

I've also read, elsewhere, that professors on the tenure track are disproportionately male, but the article didn't deal with this.

Hopefully someone can dig up the article.

Van Sun subscriber link.

[Edited to correct a name.]

[ 12 June 2005: Message edited by: trevor j. ]

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OTTAWA - Male university professors earn on average up to $17,575 more than their female colleagues at Canadian universities, Statistics Canada reported Thursday.

The University of Calgary has the largest gender gap, but many schools aren't far behind, revealing average salary differences of greater than $14,000 in favour of their male professors for the 2004/05 academic year.

They include McMaster ($17,061), Wilfrid Laurier ($16,214), University of Western Ontario ($15,439), Carleton ($15,352), University of British Columbia ($15,342), University of Manitoba ($14,813), University of Victoria ($14,211) and Brandon University ($14,188).

The wage gap at the University of Alberta, one of three universities along with UBC and Queens reporting an average professorial salary exceeding $100,000, is $12,975 ($105,203 compared to $92,228).

Thirty institutions provided data for the preliminary report. Universities that failed to meet Statistics Canada's deadline to provide the salaries of their full-time teaching staff include Simon Fraser, Saskatchewan, McGill and Toronto, and are not included.

The average salaries broken down by gender exclude professors in the faculties of medicine and dentistry. They also exclude Canada Research chairs because these elite professors, funded by a federal government program, are not paid according to regular salary scales.

Alan Harrison, Carleton's provost and vice-president, academic, said the differential is a function of the demographic reality of hiring patterns in post-secondary education.

Since men were hired in greater numbers a few decades ago, they've reached the senior ranks sooner and in larger numbers, he said. Men also tend to be over-represented in disciplines such as engineering, computing sciences and business, areas for which Carleton, located in Ottawa, and others pay market supplements to compete with the private sector.

"It's important to understand that there are issues of age and there are issues of discipline," said Harrison.

"If you take a bunch of relatively young women and compare them with relatively older men, you're going to see differences."

For example, there is no wage gap for assistant professors at Carleton's faculty of arts and social sciences, the school's largest faculty. There is also no gender gap in the number of women and men at this lowest rank, most of whom were hired within the last five years.

The picture for the highest-ranked full professors in the faculty, most hired many years ago, looks very different: there are 28 women at this rank compared to 58 men, who make an average of $8,000 more than their female counterparts, said Harrison.

"If you do the regressive analysis, there is no problem to be explained. It's explainable by differences in age and differences in disciplines ... I don't think it's fair to say there's a systemic bias."

Wendy Robbins, chair of the women's committee of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, disagrees. While conceding the demographics explain some of the wage gap, she says institutional "sexism" across the university system is also partially to blame.

"I've been at this business since the 1970s, and there's always been a gap. It just seems to be stubbornly persistent. If you adjust for age and discipline, you can begin to narrow it, but you can't explain it away completely. We have to use the word sexism. It's plain and simple," said Robbins, a professor of English and women's studies at the University of New Brunswick.

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Anyway with regards to sexism at an institutional level, the whole argument that because it was mostly men given tenure 'back in the day' women are underrepresented, but it's not sexits, it's just the way it is. ARG! The sexism is built in, even if it does reflect a reality from a while back (which I'm not sure I buy, given the discrepency in funding between the humanities and engineering, say) That's the way it is, and now many younger -and middle aged! that's the part they forgot- teachers, particularly women, have to teach as sessionals for low pay, doing way more in order to keep open the possibility of getting that tenured position.

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I've been at this business since the 1970s, and there's always been a gap. It just seems to be stubbornly persistent. If you adjust for age and discipline, you can begin to narrow it, but you can't explain it away completely.

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[ 12 June 2005: Message edited by: Amy ]