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These two reports, and the charts that follow, were done for a class, Women and the Legal System, at the University of Maine at Orono, in the fall of 1997. The class was taught by Martha Broderick.

Women and Money
at the University of Maine
Orono, Maine
An Analysis
by
Lynn Bentz, Jean Hay
Lyn McLaughlin, Fawn Robinson
December 2, 1997

 ``It shall be unlawful employment practice for an employer—

1. to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment , because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin:

or

2. to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.’’

Summary

We undertook a study of the university’s funding priorities as it pertains to women on the University of Maine campus at Orono on the heels of the public announcement of the filing of a federal complaint charging the university with violating the 25-year-old Title IX federal statute requiring gender equity in school sports programs.

We briefly analyzed the University of Maine Athletic Department’s funding priorities, but took a more in-depth look at the funding priorities in regards to the faculty of the university, with our focus on those in teaching positions. We analyzed the salaries of faculty and teaching administrators, and the representation of the faculty in various categories by gender.

We found an astonishing disparity between women and men at the upper levels of pay and position – a mere 7.3 percent of women listed in the top quarter of the salary scale, and only 16.2 percent showing up as full professors.

As we moved to the lower end of the pay and job scales, women came into more prominence, with women holding 54 percent of the paid positions in the bottom quarter of the salary scale, and accounting for a full two-thirds of the lowest-paid instructor positions.

We also found that, whether full-time or part-time, whether professors, associate professors, assistant professors, instructors or lecturers, women were consistently paid on average less than their male counterparts with the same job titles.

On average, women faculty salaries are 25 percent lower than those of men. Full-time women faculty members are paid on average 19 percent lower than full-time men faculty members. The average pay of part-time women faculty is 37 percent less than the average for part-time male faculty.

Broken down by job category, women instructors get paid 39 percent less, women assistant professors 9 percent less, women associate professors 11 percent less, women professors 16 percent less, and women department chairs 28 percent less than their male counterparts.

The closest to parity comes in the athletic department, where women lecturers who are also coaches are paid within 4 percent of their male counterparts. However, less than one in four (23 percent) of the lecturer/coaches are women.

Title IX

  Title IX was the governmental mandate for equal funding and increased participation for men and women in sports programs. Compliance with Title IX is based on meeting one of these requirements:

    1. Programs expansion for the disparate gender.
    2. Meeting the interests of the disparate gender, and
    3. ``Provide athletic opportunities to females and males substantially proportionate to their respective enrollment.’’

 

The University of Maine has been slow to comply with these regulations.

``If, 20 years ago, the powers that be had started on a path and said, `all right, we’re going to drive this thing accordingly, we wouldn’t be where we are today. That’s not just Maine, that’s nationally,’’ said Mike Ploszek, former athletic director of the University of Maine in 1990, in a Dec. 26, 1992 article in the Bangor Daily News.

The Bangor Daily News also reported figures showing the unequal representation of women and the lack of funding for women’s athletics. In the 1990-1991 school year women athletes received only 24 percent of the operating budget even though they comprised 31 percent of the participating athletes. They received only 16 % of the awarded scholarship money.

The figures were a sad representation of the University of Maine’s concern with Title IX compliance.

The first serious attempt to rectify this inequality was a proposal called ``Realizing the Dream: A Proposal for Achieving Gender Equity in Athletics at the University of Maine,’’ written by Dr. Suzanne Estler, director of the Office of Equal Opportunity, May 1995. This proposal called for a five-year plan to correct the Title IX non-compliance.

The proposal showed that in 1993 the University of Maine only allocated 26 percent of the athletic budget to female sports. Within the next five years, according to the report, the budget would reflect a proportionate spending for men and women.

The proposed budget for the athletic department allocated for women in 1994 was 26 percent of the total. The 1995, 34 percent of the athletic budget was targeted for women’s sports. In 1996, the proposed budget was 38 percent for women’s sports, with the portion of the budget designated for women’s sports in 1997 set at 39 percent.

This was a definite plan for equality for women in sports.

However, the proposal fell short in its implementation. A revision of the proposal occurred in 1995, which once again showed a 5-year plan for compliance with Title IX. The new promise was that by the year 2000, the University of Maine would allocate 38.2 percent of the athletic budget to its women students.

The numbers in the revised report showed that the University had not lived up to the original proposed compliance schedule. The actual budget in 1995 was only 31 percent, not the 34 percent previously suggested. Similarly, in 1996, the University had only 33 percent, not the proposed 38 percent, of the budget designated for women athletes.

This struggle for compliance showed the impact of an institution which did not immediately set out to meet federal regulations when they were first enacted 25 years ago. It is difficult to catch up once a school has fallen behind. The sexual discrimination in sports is still evident at the University by the lack of serious commitment to Title IX compliance.

Faculty Disbursement Study

 With the campus non-compliance with Title IX a matter of public record, we moved on to analyzing the faculty make-up and compensation by gender.

We first received a gender breakdown by job title from the campus Public Relations Office, which showed a highly disproportionate ratio of men and women, particularly in the more advanced job classifications.

Information from the campus Office of Equal Opportunity showed that not many women held high-paying positions.

But neither of these documents had the detail we needed for an in-depth analysis.

After getting either resistance or outright refusals from office staff in various departments to release salary information along with named faculty, we discovered a 100-page booklet in Folger Library, published by the campus Department of Human Resources, detailing salaries for all campus employees, from janitor to president, as of February 1, 1997.

A trip to the Office of Human Resources, a written letter requesting information on disk, and a check for $25 resulted in a current (November 12, 1997) list of campus employees in a form that could be manipulated and analyzed.

Like the booklet in the library, the computer data from the campus Department of Human Resources contained all campus salaries. These were reduced by a process of elimination to a list which included designated faculty members, as well as those people holding administrative position with job titles that indicated they had faculty credentials.

We then added a gender designation to the list, querying various college offices about those faculty members whose first names did not immediately indicate their genders.

The resulting list was sorted, counted, tallied, and averaged, to get the analysis that follows. Annual salaries were used in all job classifications, but no distinction was made between academic year schedules and year-round appointments.

What we found mirrors a major finding in the Final Report of the Joint Committee to Design a Professional Salary System, which was released February 1996:

``…4. Females were on average paid less than males, even when their job content was held constant. At the University of Maine there was an interaction between gender and experience, meaning that women received less benefit (in salary) for additional experience than men did….’’

 

Bibliography

  1. Job statistics by gender, provided by Public Relations office.
  2. Salaries and Compensation Rates of Regular Employees at the University of Maine, as of Nov. 12, 1997, provided on disk by the Office of Human Resources.
  3. Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System, Fall Staff Survey 1995, Office of Equal Opportunity, Suzanne E. Estler, Director.
  4. Bangor Daily News, Sat-Sun, Dec. 26-27, 1992, UMaine Lags in Title IX Compliance by Mike Dowd, Senior Writer.
  5. Overload Compensation Schedule, from Department of Education and Human Relations – Part-time faculty pay scale.
  6. Final Report of the Joint Committee to Design a Professional Salary System, February 1996.
Click Here for Job Time and Job Classification Data in Chart Form

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University of Maine
Faculty Salary Analysis
By College

Analysis by Jean Hay
December 1997

 Method

 This study is an outgrowth of a group project in Women and the Legal System, WST 201, which focused on the University of Maine faculty as a whole. That study broke down the faculty by sex, and then into sections by job (Department Chair, Professor, etc.) and also by Status (Full-Time, Part-Time).

 The enclosed data further partitions that faculty data into the five colleges, plus non-college-affiliated faculty (Athletics, Cooperative Extension, Other).

The original data came from the UMaine Department of Human Resources, in the form of a computer disk detailing the entire campus staff of more than 2,100 names. That list was pruned down to a list of about 660, including designated faculty, plus those persons with administrative titles who also seemed to have teaching duties or designations. Gender designations were then added, and departments were grouped into colleges.

For this report, the resulting data was sorted by sex (gender), college, and job type. The raw data, complete with names and annual salaries, was then condensed into individual analyses for each college. The eight resulting analyses were further condensed into two tables showing the percentage representation of women and men in each job classification in each college, and the comparative salary averages for each of those classifications.

Summary

Representation By College

Overall, women represent about a third (32%) of the faculty on the University of Maine campus at Orono.

Broken down by college and affiliation, the range starts at a low of 6% in the College of Engineering, and broadens to a high of 66% in the College of Business, Public Policy and Health. The College of Natural Sciences comes in at the low end of that scale, with 18% of the faculty being women.

Cooperative Extension Service reaches parity at 50%, with the College of Education not far behind, with 47% representation by women. The Athletic Department (33%) and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (31%) come close to paralleling the campus-wide ratio.

The category ``Other’’ included five people in the Onward program, and two unaffiliated faculty members. In that category, six of the seven people are women, resulting in a statistical 86% female representation in this artificial grouping. Because of the odd grouping and small number, both the percentage representation and the salary averages are distorted.

The distortion of small numbers comes into play somewhat as well in the 66% female representation in the College of Business. In that grouping of only 41 people, 14 males represent the converse 34% of that total.

At the other extreme is the College of Engineering where the most disproportionate ratio of men to women is found. That college boasts only one woman department chair, one woman professor, and two women assistant professors in a faculty of 63 people.

 Representation by Job

Of the full-time faculty, women assistant professors come closest to parity, with 48% representation. Full-time women instructors are next with 43%.

Women represent 38% of the administrative/faculty in our study. Close behind that, with 37%, come both full-time women associate professors and full-time women lecturers.

Women, however, are astonishingly under-represented both as department chairs (15%) and as professors (17%).

At the other extreme, women are over-represented in part-time positions, accounting for two-thirds (67%) of shared associate professor jobs, 77% of part-time instructors, and 80% of part-time assistant professors.

Salaries

In all colleges, the average pay for women is lower than the average pay for men.

The Athletic Department and Cooperative Extension come closest to parity, with women making on average 87% of what men make in Athletics, and 86% in Cooperative Extension.

Next in line are the College of Business, Public Policy and Health, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where women make on average 80% of what men in those departments make.

Other colleges have worse overall averages – between 61% and 76% -- but interior comparisons of pay scales by job show those low overall figures are more the result of the over-representation of women in part-time positions than of real disparity in pay.

For instance, the College of Education, with a 61% pay ratio of women to men, actually pays men and women almost equally (96% to 99%) in the major job categories of professor, associate professor and assistant professor. Twelve women – and no men -- are lower-paid instructors and lecturers in the College of Education, bringing down the average for women.

In the College of Engineering, despite an overall average for women which is 76% that of men, the two women assistant professors are paid slightly more on average (102%) than the six men assistant professors. The single woman professor is paid 97% of the average for her 17 male counterparts. The single department chair, however, is paid only 77% of the average of her four male counterparts in the College of Engineering

The College of Natural Science pays between 93% and 103% of the average to its women professors, associate professors and assistant professors. However, the single woman department chair in this college is paid only 65% of the average pay for the nine male department chairs.

Part-time faculty seem to have a wide variety in pay scales, with a disparity of 235.8% turning up in one category in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. However, only two people are employed in this department, as part-time associate professors. One, a woman, is paid $28,291, while the other, a man, is being paid $12,000. The data did not indicate if course-load might account for such differences.

Conclusion

It is discouraging to see women generally under-represented in the faculty all across the Orono campus. And the pay averages in every college have not reached parity, more than 30 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred job discrimination based on sex.

However, a closer look at some of the internal details on the enclosed tables shows that the situation is not as bleak as the overall figures would imply.

The tables and lists point out where progress is being, or has already been, made. They also show where more effort should be concentrated.

This information is being presented on the theory that we can better get to where we want to go if we understand where we are at the moment.

Click Here for Chart of Pay Averages by College

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