The University of British Columbia Acts to Close the Gender Pay Gap

The University of British Columbia in Vancouver recently announced that it was giving all women tenure or tenure-track faculty a 2 percent pay raise. The pay increase is retroactive to July 2010. Nearly 900 women faculty will get the pay raise.

The pay raise was granted after an internal study at the university found that women faculty members were paid on average $14,000 less than their male counterparts. Much of the difference was due to the fact that men tended to be concentrated in higher faculty ranks and in divisions of the university that traditionally pay higher. But when he study compared women’s salaries to those of men with similar academic rank and tenure, it found that gender was the factor that accounted for about $3,000 of the pay discrepancy.