A new study of faculty salaries at the University of Michigan revealed no statistically significant difference between the salaries of men and women faculty members once key factors are taken into account.
The study, commissioned by Provost Laurie McCauley in 2024 and released this week, analyzed salary data for 2,174 tenured and tenure-track faculty members across the Ann Arbor campus, excluding the Medical School.
Read the study
“These findings represent meaningful progress in the university’s long-standing commitment to gender equity,” McCauley said. “I am grateful to Dr. Lori Pierce for making this topic a matter of continued focus during her time as vice provost of academic and faculty affairs and chair of the study’s faculty advisory committee.”
The study reveals substantial improvement from the university’s last analysis in 2012. The “raw” gender gap in salaries has decreased from about 14.8% to 12.3%. More significantly, after controlling for relevant factors, the adjusted gender gap is now less than 1% and is not statistically significant.
The research also highlighted demographic shifts in faculty composition over the past decade. The size of the faculty grew from 1,955 in the 2011 data to 2,174 in 2024. This resulted from an increase in the number of women faculty from 635 to 872, with the number of men decreasing slightly from 1,320 to 1,302.
The research team was led by Linda Tesar, the Alan V. Deardorff Collegiate Professor of Economics and professor of economics, and Basit Zafar, professor of economics, with support from Kenneth Hofmeister, a Ph.D. student in economics, all in LSA.
The research team was supported by staff members from the Office of the Provost, University Human Resources, and Michigan Medicine.
The study follows the university’s pioneering history in addressing gender equity. In 1971, Michigan became the first university in the nation to establish an action plan to address gender pay parity, following a federal complaint. Since then, U-M has conducted analyses of equity in faculty salaries on a periodic basis.
The full study, which excluded high-level administrators and focused on base compensation rather than additional pay for administrative roles or summer appointments, was overseen by an advisory committee comprising faculty and academic administrators from across the university.
Claire Boeck
This Record article glosses over some important points raised in the full report, and I applaud the authors of the report for being clear about the limitations of the analysis and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. Notably, “…women are both more likely to depart and to have been offered retention packages…a better understanding of the overall patterns would require a deeper investigation of why gaps vary across schools.” In addition, though the aggregate salary gap may have become statistically insignificant after adding controls, as seen in Table 1, a higher percentage of men have Professor rank than women (60% vs 44%), which has salary implications. The higher percentage of women at assistant professor rank might relate to women faculty being more likely to depart. The authors acknowledge that, “The current data limitations preclude us from investigating what kinds of individuals are leaving, so it is hard to know what impact, if any, these departures – that differ by gender – have on the overall gender pay gap.” To the authors’ point, if the measure of gender progress is pay gap, then yes there has been progress. But I see inequities in rank and wonder why women are departing, and the “school-specific gaps are persistent over time” are all issues that make me hesitant to declare this progress.
Claire Boeck
“While the gender gap estimates in 2024 are smaller in magnitude than those in 2012, this need not necessarily imply progress in gender equity. For example, if women with lower salaries have left UM at higher rates in recent years, that could show up as a smaller gender gap in the aggregate” (p. 5). And there is a significant mean salary gap between women and men at the Assistant Professor rank; Table 1 shows $113,488 for women and $124,068 for men.
Robert LaRoe
Apologies if I’ve missed this, but has a similar study been done for staff?