Gender wage gap persists at University of Ottawa, study finds
Female professors at the University of Ottawa earn less money than their male colleagues and get promoted at a slower rate in many departments.
Research done by a joint unionuniversity committee found that female full-time professors, on average, earn $4,030 less a year than their male colleagues. The gender wage gap at the university has been shrinking over the past two decades, but for full professors it appears to have stalled in recent years.
In 1995, according to the committee’s research, male full professors at the university earned 9.4 per cent more, on average, than their female colleagues. As of 2016, that gap had shrunk to 2.3 per cent — up slightly from 2.0 per cent in 2014.
The university and professors’ union have now set up a committee dedicated to calculating wage gaps and finding a way to address them, according to Susan Spronk, president of the Association of Professors at the University of Ottawa.
Carleton University is also investigating whether there is a gender pay gap, agreeing to bring in outside experts to review the issue and report back next year, according to Carleton University Academic Staff Association president Root Gorelick. A spokesman for Carleton said that past analyses have found “no statistically significant differences in salary by gender” at Carleton and the administration expects the independent experts to confirm that.
University of Ottawa and Carleton are catching up to a gender pay equity push that has taken place at universities across the country in recent years and found huge gaps in some cases. At the University of Calgary, for example, male professors earned an average of 17 per cent more than their female colleagues in 2016-2017. Earlier this month, the University of Guelph announced all fulltime female professors would get a $2,050 raise as a result of an equity review last year.
Amir Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor who sits on the joint professors’ union-university equity, diversity and inclusion committee, said the University of Ottawa has been dragging its feet when it comes to transparency about pay gaps and continues to about releasing information on visible minority, Aboriginal and disabled teaching staff, although it is required to. The equity, diversity and inclusion committee, he noted, which is supposed to meet and report annually, did not do so for 18 years.
“This is not a mere omission for one year,” he said. “This is longstanding neglect. Where there is long-standing neglect, what it connotes is that neither the union nor the university care for employment equity.”
Attaran said the university continues to be “unforthcoming ” with equity information about Aboriginal, visible minority and disabled professors.
“When we asked for data, the university gave us comprehensive data for women and men and hardly anything for other groups.”
The committee’s lengthy report found the university has inadequate representation among faculty members of women, visible minorities, Aboriginal persons and persons with disabilities.
“There is compelling evidence that, in some faculties, female faculty may face gender discrimination; there is also evidence that women experience slower professional advancement, and this may indeed be due to systemic factors.”
The committee said it also suspects similar problems faced by faculty who are visible minorities, Aboriginal professors or people with disability but “there is no mechanism in the university at present for accessing and analyzing data that can provide a clear picture — a situation that is of the most serious concern.”
Women make up 41 per cent of 1,236 full-time professors at the University of Ottawa.
At Carleton, Gorelick, who heads the academic staff association, said that according to their analysis, female professors and instructors face a pay gap in the range of $3,500 to $5,000. At Carleton, he said, 46 per cent of assistant professors are female, 36 per cent of associate professors are female and 26 per cent of full professors are female. That, said Gorelick, indicates “a huge gender bias.” The department with the highest pay — computer science — didn’t hire its first woman until three years ago, according to Gorelick, whereas the department of women and gender students, which is all female, is the lowest paid.
The University of Ottawa committee also found that it took longer for female professors to be promoted than their male colleagues, although that gap has narrowed in recent years. From assistant to associate rank, there is no difference. But in some faculty, there remains a significance difference in how long it takes women to get promoted. In the faculty of medicine, men could expect to be promoted from associate to full professor in an average of 2.3 years, while their female colleagues would wait 11.04 years. In education, male faculty could expect to be promoted to full professor in five years, compared to more than 14 years for their female colleagues. In the faculty of sciences, however, women were promoted more quickly to full professor than their male colleagues.
“Our report has provided compelling evidence that there is a problem of gender equity and preliminary evidence that there is a problem of visible minority and Aboriginal equity at least in some faculties on campus,” the report says.
A spokesperson for the University of Ottawa said it is “aware and mindful of the situation,” and noted that a gender wage gap committee is being created to investigate potential “gender-based, internal pay inequities.”