In B.C., men greatly outnumber women among top 100 highest-paid post-secondary employees
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2020 23:27:33 +0000
It’s still very much a man’s world at the highest reaches of elite universities in B.C.
Despite being institutions of higher learning and innovative ideas, universities and colleges are behind other public-sector employers when it comes to gender equality, Postmedia’s analysis of the public sector salaries database shows.
Of the 100 highest-paid post-secondary employees, who all make more than $300,000 annually, only 16 were women in 2017-18, the most recent year for which data was available. The highest-paid woman, Frieda Granot, a UBC Sauder School of Business tenured professor, ranked 28th on the list. The 27 men who made more money than her included 10 other tenured Sauder professors.
In 2013, UBC gave all female tenure track professors a two per cent raise retroactive to 2010 in recognition of pay disparity. “Diversity and equity are key to our hiring and recruitment processes as a matter of policy and best practices,” said Marcia Buchholz, UBC’s interim vice-president of human resources.
Five years later, a senior adviser on women faculty completed another salary parity analysis and concluded the 2013 increase addressed the original inequity.
“No further inequity had emerged for this group of women,” Buchholz said in an email. “Regardless, we continuously monitor employee data to see where and how improvements can be made and we make those changes proactively.”
Marcia Buchholz, UBC’s interim vice-president of human resources.
However, our data shows male UBC professors make higher median salaries overall than their female counterparts, and the pay gap is even more pronounced for tenured positions.
The Sun collected salary data on nearly 90,000 public sector workers who make at least $75,000 annually from approximately 100 public-sector employers, including the provincial government, city halls and universities. With this data, we produced a searchable database containing the names, titles, work places and remuneration of these public employees.
To look at the gender breakdown of the post-secondary workers in our database, we submitted their first names to Gender-API.com. Results with less than a 95 per cent confidence score from the API were excluded from the analysis, providing us with reliable gender results for about 84 per cent — or 11,500 workers at 11 universities and 11 colleges.
The University of British Columbia is the largest university in the province, with almost 17,000 faculty and staff, compared to 6,500 at Simon Fraser University and nearly 5,000 at the University of Victoria. UBC is overrepresented in the top 100 list, as it employs 92 of the 100 highest-earning post-secondary staff — many of those positions in the medicine and business faculties.
One reason UBC has so many faculty members who earn more than $300,000 is that it’s in an international competition for professors in many fields, said Hamish Telford, political science professor at the University of the Fraser Valley.
“UBC has to bid to get the faculty they want,” he said. “Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. … It’s an auction to get the best graduates in the world to come to their university.”
Hamish Telford, associate professor, political science, University of the Fraser Valley.
UBC is consistently ranked among the top 40 universities internationally, and in Canada is part of an elite group that includes the University of Toronto and McGill University.
Santa Ono, president of the University of B.C., was the highest-paid post-secondary employee at B.C.’s public universities, with a $597,224 salary plus $155,299 in expenses in 2017/18. After Ono was Dermot Kelleher, UBC dean of medicine, who earned $595,638, then Gavin Stuart, a tenured professor in the UBC department of obstetrics and gynecology who made $542,319.
UBC President Santa Ono in January at a press conference with Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart.
UBC’s many professional schools, in areas such as engineering and medicine, are another reason it has higher salaries, said Annabree Fairweather, executive director of the Confederation of University Faculty Associations of B.C.
“UBC having the full complement of professional schools, we are going to see a really tight cluster of higher salaries because you’d see high salaries in the private sector,” said Fairweather, whose organization represents about 5,400 employees at B.C.’s research universities, which includes UBC, SFU and University of Victoria.
SFU had just five staff in the list 100 highest paid faculty in B.C., including president Andrew Petter, three male deans and one male professor. It should be noted, though, that the vice-president of research, Joy Johnson, will become the university’s second female president in September.
Simon Fraser University’s board of governors has appointed professor Joy Johnson as the university’s next president and vice-chancellor.
UVic had just three people among the top 100, including its male president, Jamie Cassels, a female vice-president and a male dean.
Of the 11,500 post-secondary workers in our database, 43 per cent are women. However, women are more dominant in the lowest pay brackets: Fewer than 17 per cent of female staff make more than $100,000, while 30 per cent of men make six-figures. The gulf grows in the $300,000-plus club, where more than four out of every five employees are male.
Fairweather said part of the reason for the gender disparity in salaries is that women tend not to be promoted or to seek moving up the academic ranks to full professor as often as men.
“You’ll see a larger bulk of women at a lower rank or by the time they go through full promotion, it is coupled with less money to start with,” she said.
B.C.’s 11 universities are made up of six research universities and five teaching universities, which include University of the Fraser Valley and Capilano University. Our analysis shows there is a glaring pay discrepancy between smaller and larger universities.Set featured image
Last fall, UNBC faculty went on strike for higher pay, and that dispute has gone to an arbitrator.
Telford, who has been at UFV for 20 years and has reached the maximum faculty pay of $93,195, said lower salaries hurt smaller institutions because someone with a doctorate in economics, for example, could get far more money in the private sector or at a larger university.
“We are quickly not becoming competitive in what we can offer candidates in areas such as computer science, business, economics,” Telford said.
Sean Parkinson, secretary-treasurer of the Federation of Post Secondary Educators of B.C. which represents staff at smaller universities and post-secondary institutions, said the data shows that pay disparity is a big issue. Women, Indigenous and other minority faculty are over represented in lower paid contract work at the lower end of the pay scale, he added.
The federation’s members’ pay is determined by a provincial salary grid with no room to negotiate special benefits such as merit pay, and the vast majority are in the $75,000 to $95,000 pay range. Contract faculty, known as sessional lecturers, are teaching an increasing number of the undergraduate courses and are paid even less than that. As a rule of thumb (except for Vancouver Community College and Langara College), they are paid for the same work at about half the rate on the provincial salary grid, he said.
“I appreciate the data that you’ve pulled together. I want to say is that on the flip side, what you can’t see is the great inequity at the lower end of the income scale for post-secondary educators,” he said, referring to those paid at the lower range of salaries.
Arvind Gupta when he was named UBC president in 2014. (Arlen Redekop / PNG staff photo)
Meanwhile, one name that was a surprise among the top-10 highest-paid university employees was Arvind Gupta, the former UBC president who resigned, just one year into a five-year contract, in 2015. And yet he showed up in our data collecting $446,676 in salary and $4,190 in expenses in 2017-18.
The Sun has reported that Gupta was on a fully-paid, one-year leave of absence until 2017. In September 2017, he started working full-time for the University of Toronto.
The database includes pay for more than 88,800 public servants working at over 100 public sector agencies, including the provincial government, Crown corporations, health authorities, municipalities, universities and colleges, school districts and municipal police departments. The figures were gathered from publicly available compensation disclosure reports and freedom of information requests.
Remuneration information includes base salary, overtime, vacation payouts and severance.
Depending on how an agency reports financial data, information is from either the 2017-18 fiscal year or the 2018 calendar year.
You can search the database at: vancouversun.com/salaries
Series Box
Saturday — Part 1: The gender wage gap
Monday — Part 2: The provincial government
Tuesday — Part 3: Municipal governments
Wednesday — Part 4: Universities and colleges
Thursday — Part 5: School boards
Friday — Part 6: Crown corporations
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