Half the sky, 78% of the pay

In honor of the Bitch's decision to cut bait, I am finally getting around to posting AAUP's fact sheet on gender equity in higher ed. In a nutshell:

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has released an update on gender equity in academia. The sad story is that the 2003-04 figures show little improvement in the salary gap over twenty-five years of higher education history.

Among full-time faculty, for example, 38 percent are women. But among full professors, only 23 percent are women. Conversely, women are well represented among the lower ranks; women are 58 percent of all instructors, 54 percent of all lecturers, and hold 51 percent of all unranked positions.

The report on earnings shows a similarly skewed picture. On average among full-time faculty, across all ranks and all types of institutions, women earn 80 percent of what men earn. While this disparity can be explained in part by the uneven distribution across ranks, as described above, there's more to the story. At the full professor level, for example, women earn about 88 percent of what their male counterparts earn.

Apparently, the higher the institution's prestige, the greater the gender gap. At community colleges without faculty ranks, women earn on average 96 percent of what men earn. The gap grows at baccalaureate and master's institutions, where women earn 89 and 87 percent, respectively, of the male average. At doctoral-level institutions, women earn only 78 percent of the average male faculty salary.

(via Resource Shelf)