A new study from researchers at the University of California, San Diego has examined the gender pay gap among faculty in anthropology, business, economics, political science, sociology, and other social science fields across all 10 campuses of the University of California System. Overall, women in the study earned 23 percent less than men; however, after controlling for field of study, campus, and when faculty started their academic careers, the gap shrank to 4.3 percent.
Within specific disciplines, gender pay disparities between men and women scholars vary significantly. After controlling for several observable factors, the pay gap is the largest in business, anthropology, and sociology. In contrast, there is little difference in pay between men and women faculty in economics, political science, and other smaller social science disciplines. Notably, these differences in faculty compensation are not necessarily connected to women’s overall representation in their field. For example, in anthropology, women represent about 50 percent of faculty in the UC System, but they earn only 93 cents for every one dollar earned by their male colleagues. Conversely, women represent less than one-fifth of economics faculty, but they earn just as much as their male counterparts.
“These findings help reduce concerns that prior gender pay gap estimates are explainable by performance or seniority gaps, particularly given the similarity of job roles within title and field,” the authors conclude. “They also demonstrate that pay transparency alone is insufficient for eliminating pay gaps. A deeper exploration of the drivers of heterogeneity in gender pay gaps across fields and potential policies to address those inequities is a fruitful area for future research.”