VICTORIA MARTINEZ
News Editor

A Statistics Canada study released in August revealed that there is a huge gap in the pay of male and female professor at institutions across Canada.

At the University of Saskatchewan, male professor salaries are an average $9,807 more than those of female teaching staff.

This pay difference is similar to that at the University of Regina and University of Winnipeg, which both fall in the $9,000 to $10,000 range.

In Alberta, however, the difference is more stark. The University of Calgary has male university educators earning $20,147 more than female staff. This is the second-largest gap in Canada, after the University of Toronto.

“It’s a pretty complex issue. Gender gaps can actually occur from a number of non-discriminatory factors,” explained Barb Daigle, associate vice-president of human resources at the U of S.

These include rank, college, department and age of instructors at a school. A tenured professor will earn more than a new sessional lecturer and there is still a difference by gender in the number of professors at each rank.

The U of S has 392 full professors, of which 86 are female. This alone explains some of the difference in overall salary.
At the U of S, male professors across all ranks, excluding those in medical and dental, earned $110,550 on average. For female professors, the average works out to $100,743.

English professor Hilary Clark participated in an employment equity study in the ’90s, and noted that the gap existed then. She says a variety of subtle factors that may affect why men are still earning more than women across schools.

“In general, more women take parental leaves than men. That slows it down,” Clark explained. “When a female prof is promoted to full it is some years later than a male, maybe.”

She noted that males still dominate upper levels of all fields and that some of that is just tenure from old hiring practices. This trickles down to professors working their way up, since there are fewer female role models.

“You hear about women being more reticent,” she said.

Wages still reflect previous bias towards men, which favoured men. Those professors still maintain more tenure and women in all fields tend to be younger and less experienced.

Other factors include the departments in question, since there are still more female academics in humanities than in other areas, like engineering.

As the number of students in the disciplines change, so too will the number of male and female professors in those areas.

Age plays into the equation, as older professors often have more tenure, too.

“Traditionally, older professors are making more,” says Daigle.

Compensation models are similar across Canada, since the tenure system is pretty well-entrenched. Slower rates of gaining tenure recently may mean these patterns won’t disappear immediately.

“I’m 100 per cent confident that we’re not building any problems into this,” Daigle assured.

The U of S has previously reviewed its hiring practices and has not detected problems in hiring that, once controlled for variables including age and rank, reveal discrimination.

“They’ve changed practice recently so the department sets beginning salary. There’s a sense in which it can be scrutinized,” Clark pointed out.

“It’s a small but significant difference.”

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image: Danielle Siemens