The factors driving gender disparities in academia are so complex that simply recruiting more female staff will not “close the gaps”, a New Zealand study has found.
University of Canterbury (UC) mathematicians say that only a “nuanced set of interventions”, which takes account of discipline and rank as well as raw numbers, can solve the “gender problem”.
The study followed the team’s 2020 research showing that age and performance alone could not explain why female academics tended to earn so much less than their male counterparts. The earlier analysis crunched performance scores in the national research assessment exercise to find that “sexism” was the underlying cause of a gender pay gap that, over a lifetime, could equate to the cost of a house.
The new study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on 15 July, examined more than 1,100 UC academics’ pay records over a 15-year period. It identified five “compounding” factors that disadvantaged women.
They included the “sticky floor problem” where employees became stuck in junior roles for so long that their chances of promotion dissipated – a phenomenon that prevented many women from progressing past lecturer level. People trapped at particular levels also proved more inclined to quit academia altogether.
