What Can Clemson Do About Unequal Pay?
A look into the gendered wage gap of the faculty and staff at Clemson University.
This semester (Spring 2019), I was able to take a class called Feminist Rhetorics at Clemson University. Throughout the course of our class, we investigated many different aspects of culture and tradition (among other things) that perpetuate gender inequality in society. Our task for the end of the semester was to write a research paper about an issue within feminist rhetorics based on what we've learned this semester.
Everyone was allowed to choose their own topic, and I chose a broader issue that affects our country as a whole, whereas some of my classmates chose to write about a gendered issue within Clemson University. After reading some of their ideas and hearing about gendered issues that are affecting our university in real time, I decided that I wanted to take a crack at something relevant to gender inequality in my time at Clemson.
I looked online and managed to find Clemson University's reports of university employees, divided by gender, and professor salaries for 2017, broken up by college. What I found seems to simply perpetuate what we all assumed: fewer women work at the university than men, and they are typically paid less as well.
Clemson University's most recent fact sheet from 2017 reported that, between faculty and staff, they employed 2,395 women and 2,459 men. This may seem like an infinitely small gap, but when the numbers are broken down, the difference is much more significant. Most of the employees that give the illusion of a nonexistent gender gap fall under the generic staff: there are 1,759 women and 1,418 men on Clemson's staff.
Clemson reported that they had 482 female instructional faculty members and 766 male instructional faculty members; they also reported 36 female research faculty members and 94 male research faculty members.
These numbers are even more significant when you break them up by college. Clemson is a predominantly Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) school. The College of Engineering, Computing, and Applied Sciences awarded the most degrees in 2017 at 1,635. The dean of the College of Engineering, as well as most of the Clemson-named endowed chairs, are males who make upwards of $180,000 annually.
Most full-time professors are male, and most of the women in the college are associate professors who are paid much less than full-time male professors. For example, there is one female and one male Department Chair/Head, who have the exact same title, and the female department head makes $193,057 annually, compared to her male counterpart's $198,028 annually.
However, for several currently open faculty positions, at the end of the qualifications section on the application page, it says "Applications from women, members of underrepresented minority groups, veterans, and persons with disabilities will be particularly welcomed." So, Clemson is working to fix the issue; they are consciously making efforts to hire women, minorities, and people with disabilities.
But, there is still a significant difference in the pay between men and women of Clemson's faculty. While Clemson began as an all-male military college in the late 1880s, they have had almost 65 years as a coeducational institution to do right by the women on campus – both students and faculty.
The pay gap between male and female faculty members in the same positions on campus makes a disparaging claim about the women that Clemson seems to be trying so hard to recruit for the university. If Clemson really wants female faculty here, they need to show it.
Asking for applicants isn't enough – if hired, these women need to be paid the same as their male colleagues. They are just as capable and just as educated, and the pay needs to signify that. The fact that Clemson has neglected this pay difference shows that they don't value their female faculty as greatly as their male faculty although they bring the same education and experience to the table.
While this article focuses on Clemson's faculty directly, this gender inequality and the pay gap is a nationwide issue. The American Association of University Professors recently collected data from over 380,000 full time and part-time faculty members and senior administrators from 950 colleges and universities across the U.S. Their study found that "salaries for women full-time faculty members continue to lag behind those paid to men.
On average, women were paid 81.6 percent of the salaries of men during the academic year 2018-19. The differences are attributable primarily to an unequal distribution of employment between men and women in terms of institution type and faculty rank." If any school, anywhere, wants to reduce, or better yet eliminate, the gender wage gap in university faculties, they are going to have to make a much more significant effort.
There needs to be equality in both the distribution of employment opportunities and the pay that accompanies them. It's time for America's universities to take charge of this change and do everything in their power to make it a reality.
