May 2, 2018
Some years ago at a Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Forum in Ottawa, a representative from the University of Saskatchewan (USask) gave a presentation about gender-based pay inequities at that institution. The “take-home” message? If your university or college provides discretionary salary [aka, market differentials, at Memorial] to academic staff, over a relatively short period of time, gender-based wage disparity will arise. In other words, men get extra pay, women don’t; men get more, women get less. This difference carried through a career leads to an issue with pay equity.
Over the past few months, the MUNFA Negotiating Committee has performed a salary analysis similar to that carried out previously at USask, and – not surprisingly – here at MUN, we too, find ourselves with a serious gender-based salary inequity. Whether the analysis was done with data provided by this university’s administration, or data available from Statistics Canada (StatsCan), the result is the same: male Academic Staff Members (ASMs) are paid more than female ASMs at each rank. A few examples from data provided to MUNFA by MUN in accordance with Clause 1.30 of the Collective Agreement:
- After 5 years of service at Assistant Professor (on the cusp of tenure and promotion to Associate), female ASM salaries trail their male counterparts by $5000;
- After 6 years of service as an Associate Professor (now eligible for timely promotion to Full, for example), male ASM salaries exceed those of their female colleagues by $10 – 13,000;
- And with up to 8 years of service as a Full Professor, the salaries of female Full Professors can be anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 less than their male colleagues with the same years of service.
Statistics Canada data for MUN paint a similar picture. While StatsCan does not tabulate gender-based information by rank, mean salaries for women ASMs average nearly $10,000 lower than their male counterparts, while median remuneration for women is listed as $13,000 lower than men.
The MUNFA Negotiating Committee is appalled at such gender-based discrimination, and we think this must be addressed, quickly, and effectively. What do you think?
In solidarity,
MUNFA’s Negotiating Committee:
- Jon Church (Chief Negotiator), Medicine
- Alison Coffin, MUNFA Executive Officer (non-voting)
- Dan Duda, Library
- George Jenner, Earth Sciences
- Kurt Korneski, History
- Leroy Murphy, Business
- Dave Peddle, Grenfell Campus
- Nathalie Pender, Grenfell Campus
- Nicole Power, Sociology
- Richard Rivkin, Ocean Science