Women Professors' Salaries at Seton Hall
I've been asking for some kind of lawsuit about under-appreciation of women, and I just heard about a very interesting one. The New Jersey Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case about pay discrimination affecting women professors from Seton Hall, a liberal arts college. At this site, http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/11/nj_supreme_court_allows_wage_d.html you can read more about this case. The NJ Supreme Court voted five to one to allow the case of three women professors to proceed even though it appeared the salary difference had been going on for years, much longer than the statute of limitations. In the opinion, one of the justices wrote, "We hold that the payment of wages on a discriminatory basis proscribed by (state law) is, and remains, an actionable violation of our state's anti-discrimination law as long as the wage remains tainted by the original discriminatory action. Each payment of such discriminatory wages thus constitutes a renewed separable and actionable wrong."
The professors, all over sixty years of age, are tenured and have been with the university at least nineteen years, but the justices limited remedies to the last two years because of statue of limitations. The case was started in 2007, and stemmed from a university report of salaries analyzed by college, rank, gender, and salary. Earlier, we discussed here issues in getting and publicizing such data at different institutions. Defendants Paula Alexander (Associate Professor of Management, Stillman School of Business), Joan Coll (Professor of Management, Stillman School of Business), and Cheryl Thompson-Sard (Associate Professor of Professional Psychology and Family Therapy, College of Education and Human Services) brought this lawsuit because each had salaries ranging from fifteen to fifty thousand dollars less than younger and/or male professors in their fields. They had requested salary adjustments after the report was released, but no relief was given by the schools.
Cheers,
Laura
How do you feel about such lawsuits?
A. A victory for them is a victory for all women who are underpaid compared to their colleagues
B. It's nice for them to possibly get more money they deserve, but it's not so
important to me.
C. I just don't resonate to lawsuits. I'd rather women used other strategies to get
what they deserve.
Yes, if the courts start trying to reform the universities' criteria for promotion and tenure, there will be a prolonged ugly fight. I hope they will simply apply the criteria that the institutions set out for themselves, but as the bottom line, require that they be fair to both women and men. I would not mind their asking that the criteria be rewritten by the university, but saying that they must privilege x over y would be scary. And courts have been known to do such things in their decisions.
cheers,
Laura
Okay, I see I forgot to pick a potential answer. It's going to be A. I worry that the courts won't get the criteria correct, but just having the suit filed gets the attention of the bad actors everywhere (or almost everywhere). The lawyers who advise higher education administrators always let them know of such lawsuits, and win or lose, they have a big impact.
I've got to say, though, that the courts might decide teaching is important (gasp!) and that would really shake the system up.
I think it's A for me, or I wouldn't have posted this. It's a can of worms when courts try to judge academic merit, though, as several people have noted. But I agree, Helen, that these cases make far more difference than just the case being decided. Notice is taken all across the land. And so it's better for women everywhere when women sue somewhere for fair treatment.
cheers,
Laura
I would suspect that these women have been stuck for years with the big classes no one want to teach, while their male colleagues were out giving "prestigious" conference talks and publishing their least publishable unit papers, doing the things that got them the kudos and the grants with all that overhead the admins love. So what is fair, then? To judge these women on the criteria they've always used, pubs, big lectures, grants?
A. Publicized cases get the word out to women and administrators alike that this problem has not gone away and still needs to be addressed. If you don't keep the issue in the spotlight, you'll get little action as there are too many other things to consume people's time. And I think for young women it would encourage them to perhaps take one of those negotiating classes to make sure it is less likely to happen to them.
Hi friends,
Advice my postdoc mentor gave me when I was looking for my first academic position was, "They'll never want you more than they do when you're being hired, so ask for what you really need then, and they'll find some way to get it for you." I didn't do that for salary but I did it for laboratory equipment, and was one of the first at Occidental College to get a generous equipment allowance when I arrived. If you want a good laugh, my starting salary was $12,000 per annum.
cheers,
Laura
I'd like to see the courts get involved in hiring more than salaries. These issues are a can of worms. Cost of living increases happen, yes, but presumably we have women going up but not as fast or a high as men? Or as younger women?
One issue is salary compression, where junior faculty come in at higher and higher salaries and overtake older faculty rapidly as they are promoted, so everyone is making a similar amount. It sounds like this situation is beyond that, however, if they make so much more. I'd need to compare publication records, etc, to know if the difference was fair.
I'm not sure the courts can evaluate this sort of thing fairly. Time in service is not really much of a criterion for academic salaries as far as I know. It's research and grants, to some extent political. This could be a situation where some of the women were undervalued doing service work early and that just propagated down the years. Most places claim merit has some relevance, so it would matter that these three have great research records. That could be true, but it isn't made so clear in the article.
Darn! I'm curious to see what other people think about this one, but no one has posted. I'm ambivalent about it.
