An article appearing in Nature.com/Scientific Reports describes an empirical study based on a "ten campus locations ... grouped in one public university system, which is a network of public universities operated and funded by a state. Ten campus locations within the university system share the same governance structure and operate under the same policy orientation including faculty hiring and promotion."* The pay of faculty in this system are available as public records. I can't imagine what university system that might be!
In any case, this unknown university system has a gender pay gap. It also has a pay system consisting of official pay scales for faculty who are also paid off-scale premiums above the official scales. I'm just guessing, of course, but I would wager that back in the day, faculty were actually paid mostly at the official scales but labor market pressures over time created the off-scale system. (Just a guess, of course, based on the history of UC which - who knows? - might conceivably actually be the unknown university system the authors studied.)
Anyway, the authors find "...that the gender pay gap in [off-scale] pay is not highly associated with such academic performance indicators based on productivity. In fact, we found that none of our variables helped explain the existing gender gap. This finding is consistent with the previous literature that the salary allotted outside of the pay grade system favors men regardless of one’s academic position."
Put another way, the more the pay system deviates from the uniform official scales, the more it opens up the possibility of a gender pay gap.
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*Kim, L., Hofstra, B. & Galvez, S.MN. A persistent gender pay gap among faculty in a public university system. Sci Rep 14, 22212 (2024): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-72871-5. Thanks to Anand Bodapati for bring this article to the attention of yours truly.
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