Gender pay gaps in the social sciences

Area of Science:

• Social Sciences
• Higher Education Studies
• Economics of Education

Background:

• Gender pay disparities are a persistent issue in academia.
• Existing research often struggles to isolate unexplained salary gaps due to productivity and seniority.
• The role of field-specific norms in perpetuating these gaps requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To conduct a longitudinal, multifield analysis of the gender pay gap in academia.
• To directly link individual faculty salaries with scholarly productivity measures.
• To identify the proportion of the gender pay gap that remains unexplained by productivity, seniority, and other controls.

Main Methods:

• Utilized administrative data from the University of California system across five social science fields.
• Combined detailed pay records with bibliometric data (publications, citations).
• Employed statistical decomposition to analyze the sources of the gender pay gap.

Main Results:

• A raw gender pay gap of 23% was observed, reducing to 4.3% after controls.
• Scholarly productivity and seniority had minimal impact on the remaining unexplained gap (17%).
• Significant gender gaps in publications were found, but not in citations after accounting for output and career length.

Conclusions:

• Pay transparency alone is insufficient to eliminate academic salary disparities.
• Equitable representation within a field is not a prerequisite for pay equity.
• Field-specific norms and institutional structures play a crucial role in unexplained gender pay gaps, necessitating targeted interventions.