McMaster raises pay for all female faculty

University addresses gap in wages

• An across-the-board pay raise for all female faculty at McMaster University is designed to level professors’ pay package, part of a shift at Canada’s academic institutions to address female professors being paid less than male colleagues.

On July 1, a $3,515 raise will be given to all female professors after an internal study compared faculty salaries across all departments.

“This signals to the world, to Canada and to Hamilton that McMaster is truly committed to equality. It sends a very clear signal that we are interested in recruiting the best faculty, including women,” said Charlotte Yates, the school’s dean of Social Sciences who headed a task force into the advancement and inclusion of the school’s female faculty.

David Wilkinson, the uni- versity’s provost and academic vice-president, said the change was overdue.

“We should have been addressing this, but the issue has come to the fore, we’ve addressed it, done the analysis and are making the adjustment,” he said.

The noise started in earnest nationally in 2008 after not a single female researcher was named as one of the 19 Canada Excellence Research Chairs.

The stark difference between the student pool — which reached gender parity in 1989 and has since had a majority female undergraduate population — and the faculty brought an outcry.

Nationally, male professors outnumbered female professors two to one.

At McMaster, 35 per cent of full-time faculty members were female, a lower percentage of whom were tenured; female professors were represented the most in humanities (46 per cent) and the least in engineering (10 per cent).

In response to the outcry, the federal Ministry of Industry appointed Lorna Marsden — whose credentials include being a former professor, Senator and president of two universities — to look into the career trajectories of female faculty across Canada.

“University administrators began to ask themselves some tough questions and do a little soul searching,” Marsden said at the time.

The 2010 Marsden Report found career paths of women “s t ar t early in life with stereotypes that define roles and expectations,” hampered by “a lack of role models and mentors.” Once on faculty, women were often hurt by “a rigid tenure track structure, challenges associated with the paid work-family life balance.”

The report called for more support and co-ordination by governments and institutions to achieve a better gender balance in academia.

It elicited a cumulative body of study and now action.

In 2012, McMaster asked Yates, who is also a professor in Labour Studies and Political Science at the school, to head a task force into the advancement and inclusion of female faculty at the school.

It was the first time the issue had seriously been addressed at a high level since 1990.

As that study was under way, the University of British Columbia was first off the mark with a pay raise, giving a two per cent increase to female faculty in 2013.

“They were probably the pioneer in this for addressing inequity through an acrossthe-board raise,” Yates said.

Yates’s report, submitted last year, included a statistical analysis showing a salary differential of about $2,350 in favour of male faculty.

Her report focused on other areas — including harassment policy, hiring practices, leadership opportunities and merit pay evaluation for those on pregnancy or parental leave — leaving the pay issue to be studied further.

That study in now complete: the university found a systemic gap of $3,515 between male and female faculty, even adjusting for seniority, tenure, faculty and age.

The school is also moving toward an equal gender split in new faculty appointments, said Wilkinson.

“This is a gradual change of culture, and it’s part of an ongoing process,” he said.

University administrators began to ask themselves some tough questions