Racial and Marital Status Differences in Faculty Pay
Introduction During the 1960s and early 1970s a series of affirmative action initiatives were passed in the United States to help ensure that workers would not be treated unfairly based on their personal characteristics, such as gender and race/ethnicity.(1) Since that time much attention has been directed toward determining whether workers experience differences in pay based on their gender and/or race, and if any observed differences are decreasing over time. Empirical studies have focused on both the differences in the average salaries for two groups of employees ("total wage gap") and the portion of the total wage gap that cannot be attributed to differences in average worker characteristics such as experience ("unexplained wage gap"). The fact that some of the wage gap between two groups of employees is explained by selected characteristics does not necessarily mean that this difference is justified. For example, earnings differences for faculty that are attributed to field may be inconsistent with the notion of comparable worth. Likewise, the inclusion of variables representing faculty rank have been criticized on the grounds that discrimination in promotional opportunities for different groups of faculty would lead to an understatement of the true unexplained wage gap. Studies to date from the general labor market have shown that the total wage gap between men and women has declined over the past thirty years, although inequities persist.(2) Although the total wage gap between blacks and whites in the United States fell during the 1960s and 1970s, recent studies show that this differential has widened during the 1980s (Cain, 1986; Cotton, 1993; Haberfeld & Shenhav, 1990; O'Neill, 1990; Juhn, Murphy & Pierce, 1991; Verdugo, 1992; Levy & Murnane, 1992; Smith, 1993; Card & Krueger, 1993; and Card & Lemieux, 1994). In the academic labor market, a notably different profile emerges with regard to differences in earnings by gender and race. Studies by Barbezat (1991) and Ransom and Megdal (1993) have shown quite convincingly that the unexplained wage gap between male and female faculty has not changed very much from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s. Though the topic of gender equity in academe has received considerable attention, relatively few empirical studies at either the institutional or national level have addressed whether there are unexplained differences in faculty pay by race/ethnicity. The few studies to date that have examined faculty pay by race have concluded that there are smaller earnings differences (in terms of both the total and unexplained wage gaps) between black and white faculty than are found in the general labor market (Gordon, Morton, & Braden, 1974; Barbezat, 1991; Riggs & Dwyer, 1995). However, there is virtually no evidence as to how faculty in other race/ethnicity categories, such as Hispanics and Asians, have fared relative to white faculty in terms of earnings and whether their treatment further varies for men and women. Studies of racial discrimination for the broader labor force have long emphasized the importance of analyzing salary equity for workers across multiple racial/ethnic categories (Gwartney & Long, 1978; Reimers, 1983; Verdugo & Verdugo, 1984; Verdugo, 1992; Cotton, 1993). As Verdugo and Verdugo (1984) note: "The omission of other groups from such analyses is detrimental because research . . . indicates that there are important earnings differences among minority groups. . . . The failure to include other ethnic/racial groups in analyses or earnings differences results in a perpetuation of the belief that all ethnic/racial minorities are similarly disadvantaged and that all undergo the same labor market processes" (p. 417). These and other studies have shown that Hispanics and Asians have different labor market experiences from those of non-Hispanic blacks. For example, Gwartney and Long (1978) report that Asians earn more than whites and that the opposite is true for blacks and Mexican Americans. …