Most studies show continuing salary discrimination against women in academia and in administrative roles. One of the only segments of women who are gaining in the income game are self-employed women: “women’s segmentation and segregation implies that women may often hit the ‘glass ceiling’ in their careers, which in turn might become the motivation for a woman to start a business” (Hackler 10). Across the four years I was teaching full-time, my salary has actually fallen this past year from my start rate (if travel funding or lack thereof is accounted for). I have hit the ceiling. Women who fail to start a business of their own cannot object to continued lack of job security and lower pay in contrast with male counterparts; they have to accept whatever terms they’re offered.
In this hiring cycle, I had a dozen interviews for tenure-track, high paying jobs and lost all of them, despite making this video to assist a teaching demonstration for one of them. Nearly all of these schools are state universities and colleges that receive government funding, and yet they never provide an explanation for their hiring decision or justifications for salary underpayments. The exact salaries for all faculty making over $40,000 is listed online publicly for all state institutions, such as UTRGV. A glance at these numbers proves that female faculty of equal education and experience are usually paid less than their male counterparts.
Two Ivy League educated professors from the University of Virginia, Sarah Turner and Kerry Abrams, published a study on the $3,638 gap in salaries for female employees in academia after toiling in this system for a couple of decades. In another study of UC Berkeley, the scholars even exclaimed there was “nothing new here” as they reported that “white women and people of color” earned less in 2015.
The Association of American University Professors (AAUP) published a study that women “lag in tenure” and “salary.” The most disenfranchised category are tenured women in “doctoral institutions,” making up only 25% of the faculty. This is the category I am competing in after publishing a couple of scholarly books. I am thus over-qualified to teach at community colleges, where there’s relative pay equality, but hardly any professors with PhDs. The key point in the AAUP article is one that echoes through many others: “across all ranks and all institutions, the average salary for women faculty was 81 percent of the amount earned by men..., which has