University of California, San Francisco Addresses the Gender Gap in Faculty Pay

The University of California, San Francisco recently released a new report on the gender gap in faculty salaries. The good news is that in the schools of dentistry, nursing, and pharmacy there was no gender pay gap. In the School of Medicine a gender gap in salary pay was identified in seven of 28 academic departments. Overall women faculty members were paid 3 percent less than male faculty members.

But further analysis found that the pay gap in four of the seven departments was not due to gender bias but from factors such as academic rank, length of tenure, subspecialty within the department, etc. In three departments where gender equity in pay were found, the university paid out more than $1.5 million to 131 faculty members who had received unequal pay.

In addition, $217,000 in salary adjustments were made to 39 faculty members in the department of medicine and one in the department of neurology, retroactive to July 1, 2015.

Brian Alldredge, vice provost for academic affairs at the university stated that the “campuswide inequity of 3 percent is disturbing to some, but encouraging to others who see the figure as small. The important thing is, we didn’t just put the report on the shelf and pat ourselves on the back that it wasn’t higher. We did the work to correct it.”

The University of California, San Francisco also reported that the latest data from the American Association of Medical Colleges shows that it was the highest percentage of women who are full professors of any of the top 10 nationally ranked medical schools. Women are 32 percent of all full professorships at UCSF, as compared to 21 percent at medical schools nationwide.