Science and Research committee  I'll just stress that we have the y-value mechanism, which sets the floor, but what is true at Dalhousie and so many other institutions is that when we're hiring folks from equity-deserving groups, it's a wildly competitive market and often we're paying high salaries to compete with other institutions.

Science and Research committee  We've been chatting about this a lot at our institution. It's important to look at hiring practices for faculty but also at what we're doing earlier on in the pipeline for graduate students in general. I think scholarships and opportunities for graduate students, to make sure that we're graduating high volumes of scholars from equity-deserving groups, will be critical and important to filling those roles.

Science and Research committee  I don't know that I have a lot of expectations of the federal government for that particular piece. I think the pay equity requirements relating to the federal contractors program and the CRCs make a lot of sense. I think dealing with targeted initiatives to bring students into universities makes more sense at the provincial level.

Science and Research committee  Typically, with pension plans you'll encounter two types. There's the defined benefit, where the plan promises a set benefit, almost regardless of contribution. That is what we have at Dalhousie. Your pension payout is based on your best three years of earnings. The second type of pension plan is the defined contribution.

Science and Research committee  The y-value is just used when individuals are hired into the university, so it's not helpful in addressing that particular issue. We do have something called the anomalies fund. As faculty members progress through their careers, we do an analysis of faculty salaries—again, faculty by faculty.

Science and Research committee  I guess it depends on the problem. For the pay equity problem, I would say there aren't very many barriers. Most of our faculty members' salaries are published through the provincial Public Sector Compensation Disclosure Act. So that data is readily available, I would argue. In terms of the impact of individuals potentially taking steps back from their career for parental leave or to address caregiving responsibilities, it's very difficult to collect that data and understand the impact.

Science and Research committee  Sure. For gender pay gaps, individuals have self-identified through our institutional census. Then we have their salary information readily available, so that's an easy data analysis exercise.

Science and Research committee  What we do institutionally is that before we enter a new round of collective bargaining, we redo the whole pay equity analysis. That allows us to identify if there are any gaps, not just between our male and female faculty members but also among all equity-deserving groups. We run that analysis typically every three years, using the HR salary data we have and the self-identification.

Science and Research committee  We've taken it on as our responsibility as it's something we need to be looking at for our faculty. It's important to note that at our institution we do this exercise in partnership with our faculty union. We're all reviewing the same data and looking to see if there are issues and what we could do through the collective bargaining process to remedy them.

Science and Research committee  What we notice at our institution is that what's typically required for the Canada research chairs eventually flows out to the rest of our faculty members. If we're doing it for one group, we may as well do it for all of them. Through the federal contractors program and the CRC program, we're asking institutions to do a pay equity analysis and remedy issues, or at least have a plan.

Science and Research committee  We did our analysis on a faculty-by-faculty basis. We were comparing computer scientists with computer scientists, and folks in the faculty of management with their true peer group. The discrepancies varied faculty by faculty. We also found that because we had made our regression line, it was very easy to say that this faculty member was far below where they should be relative to another faculty member who was close to the regression line.

Science and Research committee  Do you mean the overall cost?

Science and Research committee  I don't have those numbers of what they were in 2017. We did do adjustments for 81 female full professors that ranged from $1,500 to $12,000—I think it was a couple of hundred thousand dollars at the time—but then those got rolled into their base salaries and they've been incremented over the years—

Science and Research committee  Sure.

Science and Research committee  Where you would see this on our campus is when male faculty members are promoted to associate professor or full professor faster than their female colleagues. There's typically a $2,000 pay increase with those promotions. So if female professors are taking longer to reach those promotion milestones, maybe due to things like parental leave, then you would see that gap.