Representation of women and minorities decreases with increasing faculty rank — even among faculty members promoted within the last year, according to the annual “CUPA-HR Faculty in Higher Education Report.” Data released today show that female junior professors are paid equitably and make up 54 percent of new assistant professor hires. But women recently promoted to associate and full professor see gaps in pay, the report says. Women newly promoted to full professor make $0.83 for every dollar their white male counterparts make, for example.
Forty-seven percent of all full-time professors are women, and 22 percent are ethnic minorities. Forty-three percent of all department chairs are women, and 16 percent are minorities. Disciplines with the highest median salaries are business, computer science and engineering. The field with the most new hires last year was health professions. The discipline with the most hiring growth was agriculture.
CUPA-HR’s survey is based on information on 273,016 full-time faculty positions from 853 reporting institutions. Some 279 of those colleges and universities provided data on adjunct faculty members. Researchers found that the biggest factor influencing adjunct faculty pay is who or what sets their pay: adjunct pay tended to be lower when the institution over all set their rate, but pay tended to be higher when the hiring department or program set the rate. Nearly nine in 10 tenure-track professors have a doctorate. Five in 10 non-tenure-track professors have one.
