The gap in average pay between male and female full professors at Dartmouth increased to 22 percent from 18 percent in the past year, according to a study released last week by the American Association of University Professors.
Dartmouth has the largest pay gap in the Ivy League, with gaps at other schools ranging from five to 12 percent. Princeton was the only Ivy League school to make progress in closing their gap.
"The gap is definitely a significant consideration," said John Curtis, director of research for the association. "[Dartmouth] should really be taking a look at itself to see if the administration and the faculty are doing everything they can to make sure that women have an equal chance with men."
At the College, however, the findings did not create as much concern as Curtis reflected.
"It is easy to misinterpret those figures," history chair Heide Whelan said. "It is basically a matter of the market -- there are more women teaching in the humanities and social sciences and, except for economics, these fields pay less."
Provost Barry Scherr acknowledged the findings but said that they were not necessarily a sign of gender inequity in pay, citing several reasons for the gap.
"We started hiring women in significant numbers in the seventies and eighties, and if you look at the older cohort now, it's mostly male and that's the highest-paid group of people," Scherr said.
Scherr also suggested that the study was skewed by the inclusion of faculty at the Tuck School of Business and the Thayer School of Engineering -- traditionally male-dominated areas of study. Full professors at these graduate schools are typically paid higher salaries than their undergraduate counterparts.
The bigger question is whether equity in pay exists for faculty at comparable levels, according to Scherr.
A common cause for the pay discrepancy throughout the Ivy League is the typical distribution of women in lower paying fields than men.
"There is a higher representation of women faculty in the humanities and the social sciences, so unless you weighted it accordingly, then women will get lower average salaries," former physics chair Mary Hudson said. "Since more of the women are in those areas, it makes it appear that women are getting less representation in compensation,"
The Office for Institutional Diversity and Equity evaluated gender issues at Dartmouth in a study during 2003 that examined the full faculty for discrepancies in pay.
At the behest of President James Wright and Scherr, IDE will lead a new study in the summer of 2005. The new study will take a particularly close look at the issue of gender equity in pay, according to Scherr.
The AAUP study found that men constitute over two-thirds of tenured faculty at doctoral universities in America. Men are also 10-15 percent more likely than women to be in tenure-eligible positions.
Dartmouth excels in the proportion of tenured faculty who are women at 32.9 percent. This proportion is the second highest in the Ivy League, behind Yale University, which has 33 percent.
