Portfolio Project 4: Gender Pay Gaps and Gender Segregation at UMA
“To effectively change what matters, we must measure what matters.”
So begins the first of two reports to UMA administration and faculty regarding two important questions:
Do faculty and staff of the university show significant gaps in pay according to their gender expression, and what are the possible sources of this variation?
Are students at the university segregated significantly into different academic programs, and if so to what extent?
The first of these two reports was co-written and co-researched with two undergraduate students, Ezra Mayo and Jesse Poole, whose participation in research and writing of the report was designed to help develop public interest research and reporting skills of these students for application in their work post-graduation.
The 2020 Mission Statement of the University of Maine at Augusta Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council commits that “The DEI Council will… recognize that inequalities and exclusions are the products of both structural policies and unconscious prejudice, and that DEI initiatives are not possible without both institutional support and healthy self-reflection and openness to learning from all members of our community.”
To engage in healthy self-reflection, our university community must be able to see itself. To that end, we offer this first in an annual series of reports to track the diversity and equity of students and staff at the university, measuring gender segregation and gender pay gaps at UMA. It is our hope that this report and its successors will provoke questions, discussion, and change.
Our findings are presented and discussed in detail in the our first report, accompanied by a follow-up report shared in 2023. A summary of 2021 findings is indicative:
• Considerable gender segregation of students by major, of employees by work unit, and of faculty by academic program are exhibited for the 2017-2021 period.
• Gender pay gaps are close to zero for non-faculty employees across this period, with slightly higher pay for those with feminine names compared to those with masculine names. In contrast, gender pay gaps within faculty ranks have remained sizeable and steady from 2017 to 2021.
• Faculty with feminine names are concentrated in lower-pay quintiles while faculty with masculine names are concentrated in the top quintiles of pay. However, the opposite pattern is found among non-faculty staff.
• Among newly-hired assistant professors from 2017-2021, gender pay gaps are essentially absent, dwarfed by the difference in new-hire compensation between the two colleges, indicating that gender discrimination at the point of initial faculty hires is not driving the significant gender pay gap in faculty ranks.
The reports on Gender Segregation and Gender Pay Gaps are available for you to through the links that lie below: