Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Equality

I can't remember where I found it, but I recently read a report that compared academic salaries across the United States over the past year. The report was broken down into various categories and across a wide range of ranks (everything from sessional lecturers to full professors) and one of the categories was gender. I don't know why, but it genuinely stunned me to see that, regardless of the rank, women are still being paid less than men. For example, a female associate professor earns, on average, approximately $10,000 less than her male counterpart. This was a trend regardless of discipline.

I am fortunate (Fortunate? How absurd that I should pick that word.) in that my medical school pays men and women the same amount of money and the only variations in salary are due to rank; after-all it does make sense that a tenured full professor earns significantly more than a non-tenured assistant professor.

Hence you can imagine my surprise when my University recently announced that they will be increasing the salaries of all of the women faculty. It seems that they looked at the trend of all female faculty in all departments and faculties and concluded that the female faculty are being paid significantly less than the male faculty. Rather than selectively raising the salaries of those women who are being paid less than their male counterparts in equivalent ranks, the University is making a sweeping statement and increasing the salaries of all female faculty.

I find this grossly unfair and insulting. Not long from now I will be paid more than my male counterparts in equivalent rank in the Faculty of Medicine. In fact, it is likely that my salary will be increased to the point where I will be paid more than some of the male faculty members who are in higher ranks than I am. And the sole reason will be that I am a girrrl. I'll be very surprised if the male faculty don't cry foul and I won't blame them at all if they do. This is not the way to promote equality.

2 comments:

Gregory House, PA-C said...

My friend attending a seminar on Women and Salary, and they concluded that the reason that women get paid less that men in most field is because they don't fight for a higher salary as much as men. They take what they're offered quicker than men.

Dragonfly said...

Very true....