‘Structural and individual forces’ create faculty gender pay gap at Louisiana universities

Clouds pass over Tiger Stadium on Monday, March 20, 2023, on LSU’s campus in Baton Rouge, La. (Matthew Perschall for Louisiana Illuminator)

Marwa Hassan returned to her teaching duties at LSU’s College of Engineering five days after giving birth to each of her children. At that time, the university did not offer paid family leave, and she knew she had to keep working to compete in the male-dominated program.

“The salary gap is true,” Hassan said in an interview. “It takes a woman working three times as hard as a man to be able to bridge that gap, but we have been trying to change that.”

For Hassan, the sacrifice paid off. Even before she was promoted to associate dean, she said she had the second highest salary in her department, behind just one man who had seven years more experience with her.

For others, their sacrifices were not enough to overcome the lack of support and they left academia. Even for women able to remain in higher education, they found their pay lagged behind their male peers.

An Illuminator analysis of the salaries of the 7,735 full-time or full-time equivalent instructional faculty at public Louisiana colleges and universities found that at nearly every rank at nearly every school, men are paid more than women. The analysis uses data from Louisiana State Civil Service as of March. Faculty members self-reported their gender identity.

The numbers show schools tend to employ more men in tenured and tenure-track positions. Tenure provides an indefinite academic appointment to qualifying faculty members who have demonstrated excellence in their field. Academics with tenure can only be terminated for cause, and it typically only happens in extreme circumstances.

More women hold full-time contingent positions that do not have tenure protections.

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Breaking it down

The schools with the overall largest gender pay gaps are Southern University New Orleans, where a man on faculty is paid on average 61.25% more than a woman is, the University of New Orleans (34.73%), the University of Louisiana Lafayette (28.57%), LSU (26.86%) and Louisiana Tech University (24.66%).

These figures are averages across all faculty ranks.

At universities, an assistant professor is one who has not yet earned tenure. Usually around the seven-year mark, faculty can be awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor . Full professor is the highest rank. An instructor does not have tenure and is not on track to receive it. These terms are also used at two-year colleges but do not necessarily correlate with tenure status

Within faculty ranks, there can be smaller or larger inequities. Across Louisiana, the rank most likely to have a gender pay gap is the full professor rank. Far more men hold this job title than women.

At some universities, the inequity at the professor rank is significant enough to skew the institution’s overall average. For example, Nicholls State University employs more women in instructional roles than men. At the instructor, assistant professor and associate professor ranks, there is either no overall gender pay gap or one that skews in favor of women. But among the 35 full professors, men earn on average 22.57% more than women professors, which makes the average pay gap at the Thibodaux campus $7,000.

Northwestern State University in Natchitoches and LSU Alexandria are the only two universities in Louisiana that have a gender pay gap that favors women.

Faculty at LSU Alexandria who are men are paid on average 3.86% less than their women colleagues. Women, on average, are paid slightly more than their colleagues at the non-tenured instructor and assistant professor rank, and women full professors at the central Louisiana school earn significantly more. Though there are double the number of men at the rank than women, women on average are paid 16.47% more.

At Northwestern State, women on average are paid equally or slightly more than men at every faculty rank. Overall, women faculty are paid 2.96% more than men, with the largest gaps at the tenured associate and full professor levels.

Northwestern State officials declined multiple interview requests to discuss what the university does to maintain pay equity.

The following searchable chart breaks down the pay gap by school and faculty rank. The story continues below the chart.

Two-year schools more equitable

Pay gaps are far less common at the state’s community and technical colleges.

All but one school in the Louisiana Community and Technical College System employs more women in instructional roles than men.

Research indicates mothers with young children are 4% more likely to be in non-tenure track positions than fathers with young children. Despite having similar duties to tenure-track and tenured positions, the average work week is four hours shorter than the average work week of their tenure-track and tenured peers, according to a Harvard study .

At several schools — including Delgado Community College, SOWELA Technical Community College and South Louisiana Community College — women faculty are paid more than the men on average at every rank.

Delgado spokesperson Rachel Hoormann said the college adopted a plan in 2021 to bring its salaries closer to the Southern regional average, which she credits with the school’s equitable pay. In 2019-20, the most recent numbers from the Southern Regional Educational Board , the average salary at two-year colleges in the 16-state region was $56,305.

Market forces

In a series of interviews, higher education leaders say one of the primary factors that leads to the overall gender pay gap is the underrepresentation of women in high paying fields.

“The gender pay gap has in large part been perpetuated by both structural and individual forces,” Maria Seger, an English professor at the University of Louisiana Lafayette said. “Those structural forces that, you know, in a capitalist world, most people would call them market forces, right? You know, English and history are just less valuable disciplines than business and engineering.”

“But there are also individual forces that we have control over,” Seger said.

The most highly paid faculty at universities are in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, law, or in business and economics-related fields. In almost all cases, the most highly paid professor at a school is a man.

For example, the 15 top-paid LSU full professors are all men. With the exception of 13th-ranked John Hamilton, former dean of the school of mass communication, the professors are in law, business and STEM fields. The 15 top-paid professors make between $248,500 and $359,324.

The 15 lowest-paid LSU full professors are split between gender, mostly in art and music. The 15 lowest-paid professors make between $71,773 and $84,534

The higher-paid professors tend to be compensated more because universities have to compete with the private sector for top talent, several faculty senate leaders pointed out in interviews. If universities can’t pay competitively, lawyers, economists, engineers and doctors will tend to practice their profession rather than teach it.

But equalizing these fields is not an easy task.

“A single institution can't overcome generations of tradition,” said Louisiana Tech University President Jim Henderson, who was previously head of the University of Louisiana System.

Addressing a culture that pushes men to be engineers and women to be teachers has to start early, Henderson said.

“Those are some cultural norms that have been deeply rooted, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that if those decisions are made from an informed basis,” he said. “Educating students early on in their education career that there are opportunities that they may not have thought of, I think that's going to be a very important part of the process.”

Recruiting students early is part of Hassan’s approach to enrolling more women in engineering. Hassan said she is developing programs for middle and high school students to get them interested in the field.

Women who end up in engineering classes tend to outperform their male counterparts, Hassan said. But keeping those students in academia is another challenge, she added.

Hassan said engineering faculty search committees at LSU include a “diversity advocate” who acts as a check on the biases of committee members and makes sure women and minority candidates are given proper consideration. That has paid off, Hassan said, pointing to an increase in women faculty at the engineering school since she first started.

Retaining women

At many schools with a huge gap between the number of women and men who are full professors, the numbers are much closer in the assistant professor ranks. These faculty members are usually early-career academics who have not yet been awarded tenure.

To Henderson, that’s evidence of progress.

“That's reflective of increased awareness,” Henderson said. “In each generation, I think there have been more examples of women being successful, particularly in STEM fields. And so each successive generation, I think you'll start to see those numbers become truly balanced.”

But studies show this is indicative of a bigger problem: retention.

Becoming a parent is something that can put women at a disadvantage in academia. Within the past few months, most higher education institutions in Louisiana have adopted paid parental leave policies that allow employees to take up to six weeks of leave when they become a parent.

Typically, it’s younger faculty members who become parents, often before they are awarded tenure. While many universities have long had policies that allow faculty to pause their tenure clock due to pregnancy, birth or adopting a child, these policies are gender-neutral, and studies show they can actually hurt women.

Pausing a tenure clock means that an assistant professor gets an extra year before they go up for tenure. On paper, that year is meant to give professors a break from intensive research activities but still allow them an income. But research indicates men might actually be using this extra year to get ahead.

A 2018 American Economic Review analysis of assistant professor hires at top 50 economics departments from 1980-2005 found adopting gender-neutral tenure clock policies actually reduced women’s tenure rates while substantially boosting men’s.

A 2020 study of biological science Ph. D. recipients from Harvard economist Stephanie Cheng found similar gaps.

“There is no gender gap in salary among individuals who do not have children. Fathers face no child penalty in their salary compared to their childless peers,” Cheng wrote. “However, mothers experience a $5,000 lower annual salary than fathers and their childless peers. Women lose approximately 7% of their salary from having children; this salary gap grows by approximately 2% each year, even as their children grow older and mothers return to the labor force.”

Because moving up in the ranks is one of the few ways to get a meaningful pay increase, women remaining in each rank longer than men compounds the gender pay gap, LSU political science associate professor Nicole Bauer said.

Bauer said she purposefully waited to have her child until after she was awarded tenure because she was aware of women who had their paused tenure clock held against them by older men on their tenure review committee.

Inessa Bazayev, former LSU Faculty Senate president, said there can still be an “old-school mentality” in departments with few women, where male colleagues might not be sympathetic to the struggles of women. That lack of support might lead tenure-track women to leave before they are awarded tenure, she said.

Ruth Moon, an assistant professor of mass communication at LSU who has two children, said universities could begin addressing the structural inequities by being more transparent about what leave is available for new parents and by expanding child care opportunities for faculty.

Women interviewed for this report said they are hopeful new paid family leave policies at their schools will pay off — and that the next wave of women professors won’t have to come back to work five days after giving birth to maintain their edge.

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