Thank you Mr. Chair.
Perhaps I should briefly introduce myself. I have been a faculty member at the University of Toronto since 1999. I served as the dean of the Leslie Dan faculty of pharmacy from 2014 to 2018. I currently serve as vice-provost for faculty and academic life, and I've done so for the last five years. In that role, I oversee faculty human resource matters, including faculty salaries at the university.
As noted by Susan, the issue of pay equity at universities in Canada and at peer institutions around the world has received significant study over the past decade and beyond. We are happy to see the committee taking up this issue. Hopefully, some of the findings that we are able to share will assist you in your deliberations.
I've provided to the committee a report from 2019 entitled "Report of the Provostial Advisory Group on Faculty Gender Pay Equity". It outlines the rigorous approach that we've taken at the University of Toronto to address this issue.
We developed a statistical model that allows us to identify the closest peer-to-peer comparisons of men's and women's faculty salaries, taking into account individual differences with respect to experience, field of study and a few other relevant factors.
For a bit of context before I provide the results of that study, at the University of Toronto we have two primary categories of faculty that have permanent appointments: the tenure stream and the teaching stream.
With respect to the tenure stream, our analysis found differences in salaries of men and women and found that they were primarily explained by experience in the field of study. After we controlled for experience and field of study, we also found that, on average, our tenured and tenure stream women faculty at the university earned 1.3% less than comparably situated faculty who were men.
Our analysis didn't find any significant differences between salaries of men and women in our teaching stream.
In response to this, effective July 1, 2019, every woman faculty member who was tenured or in the tenure stream at the University of Toronto received a 1.3% increase to her base salary in order to compensate for the difference that we found.
I want to share a couple of key lessons we learned in doing these analyses.
First of all, two key variables dramatically impact salaries and thus need to be controlled for in any analysis: experience and field of study. It's perhaps obvious to say that someone with 25 years of job experience is going to have a higher salary than someone with only one year of experience. Since newer faculty are more likely to be female at the university and more senior faculty are more likely to be male, you can't simply compare the mean salaries of all men and all women at the university, because that confounds gender and experience. Any analysis of salary equity must control for this.
Similarly, we must control for fields of study, because there are significant differences in salaries across different fields of study. For example, fields of management or law have higher salaries for faculty members than other fields of study, due primarily to market forces, which are at least partially driven by the fact that these faculty members could earn higher salaries in the private sector.
As Susan noted, we believe it's really important to review any salary analysis periodically. At the University of Toronto, we have committed to doing this review every five years. We are currently in the process of redoing our analysis to see if the changes that we made back in 2019 are holding. I don't have the results yet, but the preliminary analysis suggests that we do not currently have any differences in pay for faculty who are men and faculty who are women once we control for experience and field of study. We will be making this report public as as soon as it is completed.
A couple of other things I wanted to note are that any gender pay equity strategy needs to consider a range of things. One of those things is thinking about diversity in hiring. At the university, currently about half of all new hires in both our tenure and our teaching stream are women. We need to keep monitoring that to ensure that we are thinking very carefully about who we are hiring.
We also need to think about how we pay their starting salaries when we hire new people. At the University of Toronto, all new hires are approved centrally and their salaries are approved centrally, based on an analysis of the rank at which they are being hired, the time since their highest degree—which is a proxy for experience—and field of study.
We've engaged hundreds of faculty members and administrators involved in hiring or career review decisions in unconscious bias training, workshops and discussions. These evidence-based, faculty-led discussions have been vital in helping to keep issues of equity top of mind across the university in order to ensure the equity pay gap does not re-emerge now that we have rectified it.
I hope some of these lessons learned from our work are helpful in your ongoing deliberations on this matter.