Pay and Job Rank among Academic Economists in the UK: Is Gender Relevant?
| Author | Karen Mumford,Cristina Sechel |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12468 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12468
58:1 March 2020 0007–1080 pp. 82–113
Pay and Job Rank among Academic
Economists in the UK: Is Gender
Relevant?
Karen Mumford and Cristina Sechel
Abstract
This article presents and explores a rich new data source to analyse the
determinants of pay and job rank among academic economists in the UK.
Characteristics associated with individual productivity and workplace features
are found to be important determinants of the relative wage and promotion
structure in this sector. However, there is also a substantial unexplained gender
pay gap.Men are considerably more likelyto work in higher paid job ranks where
there are also substantial within-rank gender pay gaps. We show that the nature
of the gender pay gap has changedover the last two decades; but its size has not,
suggesting a role for suitable policy intervention.
1. Introduction
The participation of women in UK academic Economics has changed
dramatically in the last 20 years. Comparison of balanced samples for 1996
(Mumford 1997) and 2016 (Tenreyro 2017) shows that the proportion of this
workforce, that is female increased from less than one-in-six in 1996, to more
than one-in-four in 2016. Women have improved their relative representation
in all job ranks over the two decades: from17 to 35 per cent of the Lecturers;
10 to 26 per cent of the Readers/Senior Lecturers/Associate Professors; and
from only 4 to 16 per cent of the Professors. Canada, America and Italy have
also seen similar trends (see CWEN 2015; CSWEP 2017; and Corsi et al. 2016,
respectively).
Despite these gains, women are still comparatively rare among academic
economists. As a discipline, Economics nestles among the Science,
Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines on gender
representation comparisons.Ceci et al. (2014) show that for the USA in 2011,
Karen Mumford is at the University of York and IZA. Cristina Sechel is at the University of
Sheeld.
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2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Pay and Rank among UK Academic Economists 83
the percentage of females among tenure track academics in Economics was
higher than in Engineering and the Physical Sciences but below Maths and
Computer Sciences, and only some half of that in Geoscience. With female
economists encountering substantial gender gaps in promotion to tenure
(Ginther and Kahn 2004) and across the job ranks (Bandiera et al. 2016;
McDowell et al. 2001).
The relative underrepresentationof women in academia has been addressed
in a series of reports investigating the status of women faculty in high prestige
institutions, especially the early MIT study (MIT 1999) and subsequent
studies at the California Institute of Technology (Sargent 2001), Duke
University (Keohane 2003) and MIT (MIT 2011). These studies explicitly
include discussion of voluntary reforms aimed at improving gender equality
such as greater awareness of unconscious bias, more equal access to resources,
increasing female promotion rates and ensuring female participation in
governance. It is not clear, however, that voluntary programs have been
responsible for increased female participation, for example, Gregory-Smith
(2018) considers the vanguard Athena SWAN (AS) positive action program
in UK medical schools and finds no direct participation eect.
A pertinent empirical outcome measure of relative equality in the academic
labour marketis the gender pay gap. Ward (2001), in her study of academic pay
in Scotland, provides a useful survey of early national studies. She concludes
that evidence of gender dierences in salary is typically found although
comparisons are dicult due to inconsistent approaches. In probably the
first empirical study for Britain, McNabb and Wass (1997) find a raw
(unconditional) gender pay gap for academics of 15 per cent for 1992. They
have a limited range of explanatory variables (especially for productivity) but
argue some two-thirds of this gapcan be explained. When matching job ranks
with McNabb and Wass (1997), Ward (2001) finds an unconditional gap of
15 per cent with a gap conditional on explanatory variables of some 3 per cent.
An early within-institution study of gender salary dierences is provided for
Princeton where an unconditional gender pay gap at the mean of 18 per cent
is found across all faculty in 2002, and a conditional gap of 8 per cent once
measures of experience and accomplishment are included (Tilghman 2003).
A recent (2015) institutional study at the LSE finds an unconditional gender
pay dierence among academics of 16.5 log percentage points (lpp) and a
gap of 10.5 lpp after controlling for age, experience and research productivity
(Bandiera et al. 2016).
It may be argued thatwomen choose to work in low paying disciplines (Ceci
et al. 2014), implying that aggregate (across discipline) studies will generate
a spurious gender pay gap in favour of males. Discipline-specific studies of
academic salaries attempt to address this concern. Ginther and Hayes (2003)
use data from the 1977–1995 waves of the US National Science Foundation
(NSF) longitudinal Survey of Doctoral Recipients (SDR) for academics in
Humanities disciplines. They find an unconditional gap of around 15 lpp
across most of this time period with a conditional gap of some 5 lpp in 1977,
declining to zero in 1985, and remaining small and insignificant thereafter.
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2019 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
84 British Journal of Industrial Relations
Connolly and Holdcroft (2009) providea rare study for the UK, they find a
gap of 17 per cent for UK academics in Medicine in 2006, with close to half of
this gap explained (by age, experience, careerbreaks and high-profile job role).
Bentley and Adamson (2003) provide a survey of studies among academic
Scientists and Engineers. They find, subject to caveats on dierent approaches
and datasets, that conditional (unexplained) gender gaps typically sat in the
range of 12–21 per cent in the 1960s; 5–14 per cent in the 1970s and 1980s;
with very few studies reporting significant gaps from the 1990s. This decline
is argued to be partly due to improved explanatory variables but may also
reflect greater equality in paysetting over time (Ginther and Hayes 2003). Tao
(2018) uses five waves of NSF SDR data (2003, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2013) to
extend the analysis of academic salaries in Science and Engineering. She finds
unconditional gaps increase slightly from 14 to 17 per cent but conditional
gaps remain stable over the time period at 4–5 per cent. Tao (2018) concludes
that conditional (unexplained) gender pay gapsfor STEM academics are now
relatively low and are continuing to decline over time.
Studies focusing on the gender pay gap for academic economists are
rare. Blackaby et al. (2005) use a 1999 national survey of pay among
academic economists in the UK and find an unconditional gender salary
dierence of 17.7 lpp and a conditional gender pay gap of 9.4 lpp. Ceci
et al. (2014) compare unconditional (raw) gender pay gaps for Associate and
full Professors in the US in 1995 and 2010 for eight disciplines (Economics,
Engineering, Geoscience, Life Science, Mathematics and Computer Science,
Physical Sciences, Psychology and Social Sciences). Strikingly, they find that
there was only one significant decline in the relative pay of women over this
time period; the gender pay gap for full Professors in Economics which rose
from 5 per cent in 1995 to 25 per cent in 2010.
As with many developed countries (Blau and Kahn 2017), the UK has
introduced a range of equal pay legislation (Dickens 2007) and seen a
substantial decrease in gender pay dierences across its national workforce
in recent years. In UK academia, the voluntary AS Charter was established
in 2005 to advance the careers of women working in STEM disciplines in
Higher Education.1In May 2015, the Charter was broadened to recognize
work undertaken in all disciplines. The mean UK full-time unconditional
gender pay gap has fallen from 21 per cent in 2004 to 18.7 per cent in 2011;
and further to 16 per cent in 2015 (Butcher et al. 2017: 36). Wemight expect to
see a fall in the gender pay gap among academic economists in the UK as well.
Contemporary studies of the relative position of women in academia tend
to provide detailed analysis of what may be considered components in the
determination of salary.For example,gender dierences in the production and
recognition of quality (Sarsons 2017) and/or quantity of research publications
(Aiston 2014; Eagan and Garvey 2015; Joeks et al. 2014; Krapf et al. 2017);
marriage and promotion(Mason et al. 2013); applying for, andbeing awarded,
research grants (Marsh et al. 2011) and mentoring and career progression
(Blau et al. 2010). However, these studies do not include direct information
on salaries.
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2019 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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