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UofT has announced a 1.3% salary raise for all tenure-stream faculty members who are women. I’m grateful for the raise, and I’m also grateful that as a tenured full professor I have the freedom to offer the following critical commentary. 1/N utoronto.ca/news/u-t-imple…
The 1.3% raise is based on a regression model that included outcome variables on the right-hand side that are themselves prone to implicit bias, such as rank, indicators for chairs and professorships, and “other relevant factors”. 2/N
Hello endogeneity. When you try to explain an outcome like salary using outcomes that are themselves prone to implicit bias, you can end up with nonsense estimates. 3/N
Outcomes such as rank are subject to gender bias: academic.oup.com/sf/article-abs… 4/N
And outcomes such as grant funding are subject to gender bias: thelancet.com/journals/lance… 5/N
Oh, and gender bias affects outcomes like the under-representation of women in author, reviewer, and editorial roles at journals: thelancet.com/journals/lance… 6/N
Overall, gendered processes lead to the ranks, grants, publications, and other accomplishments that do or don’t show up on CVs, so when controlling those sorts of factors in seeking to estimate salary differences, one can easily understate the true magnitude of the imbalance. 7/N
This all reminds me of the time a senior administrator shared his strategy of paying new women faculty members less than men because their job offers from other schools were lower than men’s. Gosh, it wasn’t *his* fault everyone else was so biased! theglobeandmail.com/business/comme… 8/N
Bad science doesn’t make for good policy. N/N
This new study of Canadian academic salaries suggests a 1.3% raise won’t fix the UofT gender pay gap. Estimates that the gap exceeds 9.5% in fields like psychiatry, law & economics. Estimates that the UofT average gender pay gap is >3.5% overall. N+1/N
My comments on the University of Toronto’s efforts to address gender-based disparities in faculty pay are now in the Globe and Mail.
theglobeandmail.com/business/comme…
theglobeandmail.com/business/comme…
