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​York University

Available Studies

  • Bishop, Kathy. Issues in the Faculty Pay Equity Exercise. York University. 1997.
  • Equal Pay Exercise. 2020.

The study provides an overview of key points in the pay equity methodology negotiated by the committee during 1997. It outlines some of the methodological issues that have arisen. The author pays special attention to note that this overview is a report of neither the Joint Committee nor the YUFA caucus, though it has been reviewed by other members of the YUFA caucus. The study does not explicitly fit a model, but rather documents what has been attempted.

From the document it can be inferred that three multiple regressions were conducted. The regressors available were age, years of full-time university teaching, relevant professional experience, and the variable to control for membership in the alternate stream. The regressions were likely fit to the data on male faculty members, and then female faculty were compared with the male trendline, not unlike the Blinder-Oaxaca method. The salary adjustments appear to have been individual rather than group adjustments.

A debate was recorded about the inclusion of age and years since first full-time teaching position. The committee decided to use both variables in separate regression models. Since both variables stand in proxy of an “experience” variable, the committee decided an idea variable, time since entering graduate school, would be obtained via a survey of faculty. A third regression would be run including this “time since grad school start” variable. Each of the models should include a dummy variable for a special class of staff who are meant to focus on teaching.

The committee chose to use men's salary profile throughout the university as the baseline, and to make pooled adjustments. This would, in effect, benefit women in lower-paid departments, and provide little adjustment for women in higher paid departments. Since department and rank were not considered in the baseline.

The main result of the exercise appears to have found an average salary bias in favour of male faculty of $2,500. However, it is unclear how much money would be made available for adjustments, and there were concerns expressed about a limited budget. The most egregious cases of bias were determined to have priority.

The faculty association won collective agreement language in the 2018 round of negotiations that required the Employer to work with the association to engage in an analysis to determine pay gaps that exist among faculty and librarians/archivists who self-identify as women, as racialized members, or as Aboriginal (Indigenous).

The extensive analysis resulted in a finding that there were statistically significant gaps for the group of faculty members who self-identified as both women, trans, or gender non-conforming, and racialized or Indigenous. Of this group, 33 faculty members had base salaries that were more than 0.5 standard deviation below the reference group. These individuals received increases to their base salary ranging from 2% to 16%, retroactive to January 2020.