University of Central Florida’s

Male colleagues at university paid about $20,000 more

female employess don’t make as much as the university’s male workers, a new study finds.

faculty members are paid about $20,000 less than their male colleagues at University of Central Florida, according to a new survey.

The median salary for women was about $70,000, while men’s median salary was about $90,100 — a 29 percent difference, according to the study of 1,600 faculty by UCF.

The study suggested that some of the pay discrepancies could be the result of men having greater years of experience and more advanced degrees and male domination in higher-paying disciplines, such as engineering, science and business.

After researchers accounted for such factors, the gap between women and men’s salaries fell to 5 percent.

Some faculty leaders are calling for action to address the differences.

“We can do studies all day long,” said Margaret Ann Zaho, an associate professor in the UCF School of Visual Arts and Design, during a Faculty Senate meeting on Thursday. “When do we talk about fixing it?”

But UCF vice provost Cynthia Young said the school must understand more details before making any changes in pay in future faculty contracts.

“We don’t want to go forward without the data,” Young told faculty members.

The study examined faculty members’ pay in 2016 and determined their median salaries.

White female faculty members were paid 26 perFemale cent less at $69,699 compared with white men who earned $88,026, the study said.

Black, Hispanic and other minority women, except for Asians, were paid 28 percent less at $66,000 compared with men in those categories, who made $84,747.

Asian professors had the highest median salaries, with men paid $109,619 and women at $78,730.

Dr. William Self, a biomedical sciences associate professor, said the difference in pay between men and women is a national problem.

Self proposed studying the new UCF faculty members who have been part of the school’s recent hiring push to see if the men and women

were paid equally.

“I hope to see there’s some positive change occurring,” he said during the Faculty Senate meeting.

Many of the more lucrative fields were male-dominated, the study said. People who worked in those disciplines, which include business, engineering and the sciences, received some of the highest median salaries.

Other survey findings included:

The most male-dominated field was CREOL, the College of Optics and Photonics, where 93 percent of faculty were men. Its median salary was $121,482.

For faculty working in College of Business Administration, where nearly three out of every four were men, the median was $142,191.

• Women were more likely to work at UCF colleges of education, nursing or hospitality management and earned less. Nursing faculty members’ median was $73,894 in the college, which was 85 percent women, making it the most femaledominated area in the university. In the College of Education, where 67 percent of faculty are female, the median was $70,014.

Nearly all faculty in science and technology fields have earned their doctoral degrees, while only about 55 percent of the faculty in College of Arts and Humanities had theirs, the study said.

The salaries were a snapshot in time, but UCF officials said they were interested in exploring pay over multiple years for a second study that could be finished as early as September.

Young said officials wanted to determine if the gap existed between the ranks, comparing professors with other professors or lecturers with lecturers, for example, in each discipline.

UCF researchers proposed creating working groups this summer made up of administrators, faculty and others to more deeply study the issue.

School spokesman Chad Binette said the study was done internally, so there was no cost.