CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD ON HOW A UNIVERSITY’S DECISION TO CORRECT PAY INEQUITY FOR WOMEN CREATED A NEW INEQUITY — FOR MEN. ‘THERE WERE NO CONSULTATIONS, NO WHITE PAPER INTERNALLY, IT WAS JUST BOOM.’
Some get boost, but never earned less than men
Apay hike for female faculty at Wilfrid Laurier University, made in the name of all that is sacred — fairness for women — has created a brand new wage inequity.
In the small finance group at the university’s business and economics school, for instance, the two women who were hired at the same time as male colleagues and paid the same, received a raise of about $6,000 each, leaving the 13 men far behind. That hike is much larger than the typical increase for merit pay.
The raises, announced out of the blue last May, were three per cent for all of Laurier’s female professors and 3.9 per cent for all female associate professors, and were retroactive to July of 2016. Depending on the stage of their careers, the hike may also mean a big boost to their pensionable earnings.
The university has estimated the raise for 119 associate professors and 33 full professors will add $680,000 to its base costs.
Salaries for Laurier faculty range, depending on the discipline and whether associate or full professors, from $100,000 to upwards of $200,000.
The joint university/faculty committee that purported to find evidence of systemic wage discrimination had no male faculty members. Two of the eight members were male, but both were Laurier administration staff.
Interestingly, three of the female members were associate professors and one a full professor, meaning they were among the beneficiaries of their own work.
The announcement came as a surprise to many faculty.
As Will McNally, an associate professor in finance and one of the affected men, told the National Post in a recent phone interview, “There were no consultations, no white paper internally, it was just — boom.”
The committee was the brainchild of the WLU Faculty Association in its last round of collective bargaining.
As McNally put it, “it wasn’t noteworthy, no one was paying attention.”
Almost as soon as the announcement was made, male professors began asking questions.
Brian Smith, a faculty member at Laurier since 1987 and several times the area co-ordinator (or department chair) for finance, wrote Pam Cant, the university’s assistant vice-president of human resources, on May 8, the same day of the announcement.
Smith said the move “has created a major problem in the finance area,” where, he said, “when we hired women going back over 20 years, we hired them at the same time as the men and offered them the same salaries as the men.
“I know this because I was part of the hiring and I know exactly what was offered,” he said. “This is blatant discrimination.”
When Smith followed up the next day with concrete examples of finance professors who had been hired at the same time and at the same salaries, he said, “In the case of finance, there has been no gender-based salary discrimination at the time of or subsequent to hiring. … The announced genderbased salary increases create gender-based salary inequity.”
When Cant replied May 23, she argued there were differences in one cohort and that the apples-toapples comparison couldn’t be made, but agreed the salaries in the other meant “the gender equity adjustment for the female results in a salary differential.”
About the same time, David Haskell, an associate professor in digital media and journalism, was also pestering Cant and the union with questions about the methodology that the committee used.
Ten days after Haskell made his first request, a version of the method used — but not a complete one — was posted online.
According to Cant, the committee decided against using a targeted analysis, where male and female faculty would be compared on an individual basis, because they couldn’t find matched pairs for about 40 per cent of the women.
As McNally put it in an email to the Post, “This reasoning is illogical. If you can’t find an equivalent male comparator, then there cannot be a gender-based wage inequality.”
Haskell sent what he was given about the committee’s methodology to a U.S. expert on the gender wage gap, who replied that he was troubled by the fact that the committee had used only four disciplines (the business school, science, arts and liberal arts and human and social sciences, and music, social work and education), which he said were far too broad to properly capture differences in pay by discipline.
The Laurier study, in his opinion, wasn’t nearly nuanced enough.
McNally, Smith and others took their concerns about fairness to faculty association president Michele Kramer, who in turn consulted union lawyers. They advised, Kramer said, “there seems to be no clear reason to grieve the wage adjustments …” and that further, there was likely no case under the Employment Standards Act or human rights legislation.
As Toronto lawyer Jared Brown, who was unofficially consulted by a handful of the male professors, put it in a telephone interview Thursday, “What’s happened here is that they (male faculty) have been sold down the river by their own union. … Their only recourse is go after their own union. That’s the conundrum they’re in.”
As for McNally, he said in a recent email to the Post, “I was very upset about this during the summer, but decided no one would care about men missing out on a salary increase. But the Laurier administration’s unprincipled handling of the (Lindsay) Shepherd affair has rekindled my interest in … another intellectually sloppy, politically correct move.”
Brian Smith is again the finance department head, for the fifth time, and on Dec. 4, asked the university for the raw data the committee used.
He hasn’t yet received an acknowledgment of his request. It’s a common one, he pointed out, for professors whose work is often tested.
“A significant trend,” he said, “is that we have to submit our data to a lot of journals to ensure it’s replicable, also so other researchers can analyze it, to ensure the findings are robust.”