Med school's female
faculty are compensated fairly
BY ROSANNE SPECTOR
A study of School of
Medicine faculty compensation reveals that women are
compensated equitably when compared to men of similar
status and experience. The study, which reviewed salaries
for the four years beginning in the 1992 academic year,
was conducted by consulting economists at the request of
the school's administration.
"This report gives us
some comfort that women are not being underpaid at the
School of Medicine," said Richard Popp, MD, the
medical school's senior associate dean for academic
affairs, who initiated the study.
"When I took this
position in 1995, one of my immediate priorities was to
determine whether faculty women are being compensated
fairly. My perception at that time was that some faculty
believed women faculty were not fairly compensated. I
felt it was important to investigate," he said.
Popp, who noted that some
female faculty have raised issues externally about the
working conditions at Stanford, stressed that the
university is equally concerned. "We're just as
concerned about those issues inside the institution.
We're doing what we can to calibrate where we are now,
and to continue to be vigilant to improve the conditions
for women at Stanford," he said.
The school hired a
consulting firm, Economic Research Services Inc., based
in Tallahassee, Fla., to do the compensation study.
Statisticians who are trained in labor economics, Joan G.
Haworth, PhD., and Hossein G. Borhani, PhD, authored the
report.
Haworth said that
compensation patterns at the School of Medicine were
unusual in that, even in the early 1990s, pay for female
faculty and similarly situated men was largely the same.
"Though these days,
most schools are very concerned about this issue and are
careful to compensate male and female faculty according
to the same principles, very few were doing so until
quite recently," said Haworth, who has evaluated
faculty compensation at more than a dozen colleges and
universities, including three state university systems
and several private institutions.
For their study of the
medical faculty's compensation, Haworth and Borhani
identified variables that might reasonably influence
compensation, such as rank and academic depart-ment, and
incorporated them into a statistical model that reliably
predicted salaries and bonuses combined.
Among the variables were:
- Rank (assistant,
associate or full professor)
- Academic degree (MD
or PhD alone or combined MD/PhD)
- Academic department
- Length of time in
current rank
- Tenure
- Tenure Line vs.
Medical Center
- Line designation
- Proportion of
earnings coming from the faculty practice program
- Proportion of
earnings coming from government research grants
- Time spent on
sabbatical (partial compensation)
After fine-tuning the
model, the analysts used it to compare male and female
faculty. They found that the model predicted compensation
for male and female faculty equally well, meaning gender
was not serving as a variable affecting compensation.
Though the study is
encouraging to the medical school's administrators
confirming the fairness of the school's compensation
mechanism they recognize faculty women do face special
challenges, as evidenced by the relatively lower
percentage of women in the higher faculty ranks, Popp
said. Based on a study carried out in 1997 by the medical
school's Council on Diversity, the overall percentage of
women faculty in the School of Medicine had remained
unchanged at about 20 percent since 1990. In
addition, women were consistently underrepresented in the
higher ranks of the faculty, reported Ann Arvin, MD,
professor of pediatrics and co-chair of the Council on
Diversity.
The compensation study did
not analyze the social and institutional forces at work
that might influence women's experiences at Stanford, but
Popp said he feels these can't be ignored.
"No matter how you
cut it, women have a harder time on the faculty because
they tend to have more responsibilities outside of work.
They take care of family, prepare meals and fulfill other
traditional female roles and I think that that's
something many of the men don't do," Popp said.
Because concern about the
fairness of compensation for female faculty is shared by
the university's top administrators, a similar study of
compensation is being undertaken by a faculty committee
appointed by Provost Condoleezza Rice, PhD. The
committee, announced at a March 1997 meeting of the
university's Faculty Senate, will present a report to the
provost this quarter, according to the committee's
chairman Robert Weisberg, JD, PhD, vice provost for
faculty relations.
"The committee is
doing a regression analysis on various factors to
determine equity among faculty salaries; depending on
what the committee finds, it will then be up to the
provost whether to make any individual adjustments,"
Weisberg said.
Since taking his position
as senior associate dean, Popp, has worked with Dean
Eugene Bauer, MD; senior associate dean for finance and
administration Michael Hindery; and the dean's financial
staff, to review every medical school faculty member's
salary, Popp said. Dozens have been adjusted upward
with most adjustments being made to salaries of long-time
faculty members, both male and female, who had
historically low compensation, Popp said.
Popp has also invited all
faculty women to one of a series of four meetings held to
learn about their concerns.
One step the
administration has taken toward making the school more
appealing to women faculty is to initiate efforts to
improve the availability of childcare an issue that
has been raised at faculty meetings. In collaboration
with the WorkLife Office on the main campus, the medical
school has conducted a childcare survey among its
faculty. At the provost's request, the WorkLife Office
used the medical survey as a pilot for its survey of
faculty campuswide. The results from both surveys are
scheduled to be presented to the provost this month.
"This compensation
study is not a one-shot thing," said Popp.
"It's one piece of a continuing effort to make sure
we have an appropriate number of women on our faculty and
that they are appropriately compensated. We want to make
sure this is the kind of place women and minorities want
to work," Popp said. "We're not done, but we're
on a good path," he added. SR
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