Female profs earn less at University

Female professors at the University are paid less than their male colleagues, according to a report released last month. Nassau Hall, however, said these numbers don't fully reflect the salary situation at Princeton, which, according to a University report, has almost no gap between men's and women's salaries.

The American Association of University Professors' (AAUP) report on Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2006, analyzes data from 1,445 institutions, including community colleges and doctoral universities, with Princeton, Harvard and Yale among the institutions studied.

Its data, which were collected from the U.S. Department of Education and the AAUP's own yearly surveys, shows that 20 percent of Princeton's tenured faculty are female and that at the full professor rank women earn 94.1 percent of what men earn.

The AAUP report examines the proportion of full-time female faculty members, the percentage of tenured, tenured-track or full professorship female faculty and the average female salary in comparison to that of males.

But the report does not take into consideration issues like age, degree or department, which have an effect on determining salary, said Joan Girgus, assistant dean of the faculty for gender equity.

"This is something Princeton worries about a lot and we will continue to track closely," Girgus said of the importance of monitoring the salary differences between male and female professors.

While the raw data are not necessarily wrong, using them as the only basis for determining gender equality is deceiving because it does not fully reflect the complexity of salary allotment and the history of female employment, she said.

Princeton's model also considers that salaries vary by department and that certain departments — especially in the sciences — have fewer female faculty members than others.

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A Sept. 25 Daily Princetonian article reported the percentage of engineering professors who are women increased from three in 1992 to 14 percent in 2003. In the natural sciences, the percentage of women faculty members rose from 11 to 18 percent.

President Tilghman agreed with Girgus, saying in an email that "when you correct for field, title and time after degree, there is no significant salary disparity among men and women faculty in the University."

In 2003, the University's Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering conducted its own study of the University's gender equity with the help of an outside consultant. Though raw data mirrors the AAUP results, showing that overall men have higher salaries than women, more precise examination showed virtually no difference in salaries between the genders. After accounting for rank, age and department, the difference between men's and women's salaries in the natural sciences shrank to 5.8 percent — which, given the study's margin of error, is virtually zero.

At Princeton, salary recommendations for tenured professors are made first at the department level and then are reviewed by Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin and the Committee on Appointments and Advancement.