Income gap persists for female faculty

Not only do statistics show women are underrepresented in the upper levels of higher education, evidence also details that they are paid significantly less than their male counterparts.\nAt each respective professorship level -- full, associate and assistant -- women are making about 10 percent less than men. However, as the majority of women cluster in the lower-paid assistant professor faculty level, overall male faculty at IU are being paid about 20 percent more than women, according to a 2006 report by the American Association of University Professors. \nLike other faculty gender disparities, the University is not alone in the income gap. \n"In general, there are more women in fields that tend to have depressed wages," said Julie Knost, director of the IU Office of Affirmative Action. "This pay trend is true in academia as well, where you find less women in higher-paid jobs like finance and more at the lower levels in the English department."\nThe main thing that IU can do to even out the pay disparity is make a concerted effort to promote women to these higher-paid positions, said Suzanna Walters, chair of the IU gender studies department.\n"We need to mentor women to move them along quicker, throw some money at them to make them want to be here and provide them with workshops and resources and other opportunities," she said.\nGuidance from senior-level faculty is necessary to help women advance within the University, said Radhika Parameswaran, an associate professor of journalism. \n"When I was working to be an associate professor, it was inspiring to see senior women in the different meetings, debates and workshops I would attend," she said. "There needs to be senior women faculty who can be role models and mentors for other women. When junior women go into a department and it's stacked heavily with men at the top, its discouraging."\nIU must also help knock down some of the roadblocks that women faculty face, Knost said. Some of the barriers she identified were tied to family issues, citing the limited flexibility in some of the higher-paid positions as a possible reason for why many women are deterred from taking these jobs. Offering women more flexibility in the sense of improved family-leave and childcare policies and extending the tenure clock process might make it easier for women to climb the faculty ladder, she said. \nAnother possible solution is to make equality an objective from the beginning and hire more senior-level women. Reassessing the hiring process and being attentive when hiring new faculty to make sure women and men are receiving equitable pay is essential, Knost said. However, officials identify a catch-22 in the hiring process.\nAdministrators are most likely to recommend people like them for promotions or job openings and because there aren't as many women with this authority, men are more heavily favored, said Carol McCord, assistant dean in the Office of Women's Affairs.\n"Nobody is discriminating on purpose," McCord said.\nHaving more women in the senior levels would improve current gender inequalities at IU, as well as ensure a fairer hiring process and a potential for more women faculty candidates in the future, McCord said. In addition, she said having more women involved in the hiring process would attract potential women faculty because they would see precedence for women succeeding at IU.\nThough the problem of low numbers of women faculty members is a complex one and will take time to solve, there are offices and officials on campus willing to make it happen.\n"We need to have a good base of women who want to make these changes happen," McCord said. "A person by herself in this situation might have good ideas, but unless she has support from other people, those changes aren't likely to happen. And yes, I do believe that we can make a change"