Thank you very much for the opportunity to address your committee on pay inequity for systemically marginalized academics. I commend you for studying this issue, which persists despite decades of evidence.
To situate my comments, you may wish to know I'm one of the eight faculty who successfully launched a human rights complaint against inequity in the Canada research chairs program and that I have written and published about systemic discrimination in higher education. From 2016 to 2019, I was co-chair of a University of Manitoba joint committee on gender-based salary differentials.
Joining me is Dr. Tina Chen, the inaugural vice-provost of equity at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Chen was recently awarded the first-ever Robbins-Ollivier Award for Excellence in Equity for a project on dismantling ableism and promoting equity for persons with disabilities through institutional action and accountability. Dr. Chen was also a member of that joint U of M salary committee.
I want to talk a little bit about the history at our university and I want to go back to 1994. In 1994, prompted by demands of the professors' union, the University of Manitoba studied pay gaps between male and female academics. A gap was found and a flat 2.84% pay increase to base salary was ordered for all women faculty. That award was paid out over two years, did not include any back pay and made no pension corrections.
Later, an unfunded research team that included me re-examined faculty pay, and we found gaps. Our paper was published in 2011. That prompted pay fairness to become a bargaining demand in 2016 when the joint committee was struck.
I want to talk about this committee. Our committee's work was, regrettably, restricted only to women faculty, and we did not disaggregate our data. Our report was only on one axis of discrimination, and even that was treated as a binary. These are real limitations, but let me tell you what we found nonetheless.
Our 2019 report found very different wage profiles for women and men in faculty and instructor ranks. Long story short, tests of statistical significance were deemed necessary, and our results did not prove statistically significant, despite being highly suggestive. Our report did find statistically significant differentials in the time to promotion to full professor—a full 18 months between women and men. We learned that from year 12 onward, women were 15.5% less likely than men to hold the rank of full professor. While all women are less likely to be promoted to professor at year 12 and beyond, the lower likelihood is particularly pronounced at our medical campus, as well as in science and engineering.
Our joint committee made seven recommendations. Among them were annual salary scrutiny and a written report of such analyses at least every five years. We recommended study into career progression to understand why women are 15.5% less likely than men to be full professors at year 12. We recommended qualitative and survey research into male and female workloads, into women's slower career progress, into differences in employment past age 65 and other climate-related issues. We also recommended study into different dimensions of salary inequity, specifically into gaps in members' pension fund accounts, which, of course, affect lifelong earnings. To my knowledge, none of our recommendations have been implemented.
This very abbreviated history of sex-based differentials at our prairie university holds some lessons. I will argue our story is representative. Where salary gaps have been studied, the impetus is nearly universally a result of the volunteer work of researchers, faculty caucuses or unions, rather than management. Regular monitoring is rarely implemented, and there is little accountability. Such ad hocery would be mitigated if there were more robust Statistics Canada reporting through the University and College Academic Staff System survey. For this to be meaningful, institutions would require more internal attention and capacity to monitor equity data, likely through dedicated funds, including a Dimensions stream.
There are two key points I would ask you to take away.
The first is that it's very clear that we need data on equity in order to take action. This includes, importantly, data for faculty with disabilities, a group of our colleagues who are rarely tracked or reported for complex reasons you may ask me about. A way to track this data for equity could be to enhance compliance requirements through the federal contractors compliance program and through a strengthened Employment Equity Act and Pay Equity Act.
A second key point is to underscore that under austerity, most Canadian universities have seen shifts in their ratios of tenure-stream appointments and a rise in non-standard academic employment. Dubbed “the precariat”, these colleagues are disproportionately racialized and gendered. Such work exacerbates precarity for women, for indigenous people, for 2SLGBT+ people and for faculty with disabilities. Faculty renewal is essential in order to be able to offer meritorious colleagues fairness and full-time employment.
I hope you are aware that national data tells us that the numbers of those who are working in post-secondary education but who are off the tenure track have grown by 500% in the last 20 years. Across Canada, full-time university student enrolment has grown by 18% from 2010 to 2020, but full-time faculty numbers rose by just 6% in the same period.
With these takeaways, and in preparing us for discussion, I'll conclude by underscoring that there is a fiction that the academy is a place of simple and pure merit, and that this fiction goes a long way toward explaining historical resistance to grappling with documented histories of exclusion, marginalization and systemic discrimination.
Despite it being 2023, there remain demonstrable barriers to equitable faculty salaries for professors of different genders and from systemically marginalized groups. Your committee is in a position to make recommendations that can help change that.
