July 27, 2022

University of British Columbia (UBC)

Available Studies

The earliest available report is from 2009 which uses data on faculty to investigate pay differentials based on gender and minority status. Later, as a result of this analysis, a special working group was formed to further explore pay gaps. The 2010 report is the first analysis released by this group and the 2012 report is an extension of the analysis in the 2010 report.

The UBC history indicates that a challenge to analysis has been the lack of a central data set in order to assess equity in faculty compensation. An evolution of data sets from human resources departments is apparent from the studies that occur later. In the 2010 study, the data is called the “May 2007 Equity data set” of 1,822 full time tenure track faculty members. There is no full list of variables reported. However, in 2010 a similar data set was used, and documentation is included in the report. Further in 2010, the faculty of medicine was omitted from the study due to the unique structure of medical faculty compensation. An additional merit-pay dataset was added to supplement the main dataset to investigate bias in bonus pay separate from salary. The 2012 report appears to include all faculty members.

In the first study, annual salary was regressed using ordinary least squares on gender, minority status and years of experience. There were additional regressions including faculty dummies and rank. To supplement the regression analysis, t-tests on promotion time were also conducted to investigate “glass ceiling” issues. The methods developed in the 2010 report were also used in the 2012 report. The latter studies used ordinary least squares to regress salary or its logarithm against gender, rank, years in rank, department, and whether the faculty member holds a research chair or distinguished appointment. In addition, an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition is used to estimate the gender pay gap. Merit pay awards were also compared using t-tests to see if the populations were statistically different. Finally, the likelihood of men and women to obtain promotions were examined using linear likelihood and probit analysis.  

The 2006 study initially looked at minority and gender differences, but found no minority pay gap. A pay differential was found between men and women and was found across faculties. The study discovered that much of the difference between men and women was driven by the rank of the faculty member, which motivated the later studies to examine the “glass ceiling” problem in greater detail. T-tests were used to show significant population differences in promotion time between men and women.

In the 2010 study, the multiple techniques used to determine the gender pay gap provided consistent results. Female salary disadvantage was found to be about $3000, or 2.3% of average salary. Results from the same methods on updated data were slightly lower in 2012, a 1.7% salary differential was found between men and women. In addition, the results from the probability of advancement found that being a woman lowers the probability of being a Full Professor among current faculty members by close to 6%.

As a result of the studies, in 2012 a 2% group salary adjustment was applied to the UBC faculty, or roughly the size of the wage differential discovered between men and women in the 2010 study and found again in the updated data thereafter. Continual monitoring was recommended to prevent the re-emergence of a gender pay gap as well as a range of policies to counter other ways in which “glass ceiling” effects manifest.