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CSU Salary Analysis Summary
CSU Salary Analysis Summary
Mary Meyer
Statistics Dept, CSU
In May 2014, Rick Miranda asked me to be on a task force, together with Sue James and Sue Doe,
to work with Laura Jensen and some IR staff to do a gender equity analysis of the salaries of regular
faculty. I got the data for FY2014 (and some earlier data) and did a fairly straight-forward statistical
analysis (documented in the appendix to this saga). In short, I found that while no systematic salary
discrepancies existed at the assistant and associate levels, once the effects of department, rank, years
since degree and years at CSU were accounted for. However, there was a significant gap at the full
professor level, and the largest gap was in the college of Vet Med.
I presented the results to the committee, then to Rick in July. I wanted to present the results to the
senior women faculty group, but he asked me to hold off until they could talk to Vet Med and see what
they had to say.
In early September I presented the results to the Diversity Symposium, which was also attended by
Laura Jensen. Shortly after this, the Coloradoan had an article that implied CSU was really on top
of equity issues, and mis-quoted Diana Prieto as saying there were no gender imbalances in salaries.
At this point there were some emails from women faculty sayingwe didnt appreciate reading it in the
paper before our group saw it/heard about i which I totally understand, but my input or analysis
was not consulted; I didnt know about the article before it appeared.
Because of this, I decided to stop waiting for permission, and gave two presentations of the results. I
felt strongly (and I expressed this to Rick and Laura and everyone else) that all faculty had a right to
know how their salaries compared with others in their department, rank, and seniority, and announced
I was willing to send people their predicted values and residuals, along with interpretation.
So, I re-ran the analysis without the gender variable, and saved predicted values to each faculty member.
This is a sort of average (see appendix) salary for a regular faculty member, given department, rank,
and seniority. I could then tell individuals that their salary was 8% under, or 3% over, this average
value.
Laura then made an IR website (now taken down) with the predicted values from the same (I think)
analysis including the gender variable. (She called this predicted value a median.) This meant that
the median given for women full professors was considerably less than the median for a man with
the same department, rank, and seniority. Of course, I didnt know this at the time, but assumed
that she was providing the same information as I had been. Since she attended at least two of my
presentations, she certainly knew what I was doing.
Later that fall semester I met with Rick, Laura, and Dan Bush to discuss future analyses. I was willing
to turn this job over to IR, because I had provided documentation of the model, the steps in the analysis,
and the interpretation of the results. Its not that complicated! However, in this meeting I emphasized
that the analysis to determine if there is systematic gender inequity at CSU should be different from
that for the individual salary equity exercise, for which IR provides data every year. We discussed the
old method where there was a simple linear regression line for salary against years since degree, done
separately for each department. We agreed that this was too simplistic, and talked about better ways to
do it. We discussed some ideas, and I offered to be involved, but after that meeting I was not consulted
again.
Fast forward to last week. Here is an email that I sent on Thursday:
Technical Appendix
The Data
There are 1045 observations representing tenured or tenure track faculty at CSU, presented to me in
an Excel file. The data set contains the following variables:
The response variable is the nine-month salary. There are several pertinent variables in the Excel
file:
ACTUAL SALARY, the yearly salary of the individual.
BOS, the basis of service. For the AY2014 data, this was either 9 or 12, reflecting the
months of service for the year.
NINE MONTH SALARY, calculated by IR. For the 9-month faculty, this is equal to actual
salary, but for the 12-month faculty, this is 81.8% of actual salary. I re-calculated the 9-month
salary to be 75% of the actual salary for the 12-month faculty.
GENDER, two levels
RANK: The three ranks are assistant, associate, full.
ASSIGNMENT DEPT: the department where the faculty member works. There are 54 departments, with 8 faculty members in the smallest (Ethnic Studies) and 64 in the largest (Clinical
Sciences).
ASSIGNMENT COLLEGE: the college where the faculty member works.
DEGREE YEAR: the year the faculty member received the PhD.
YEAR CSU: number of years as faculty at CSU.
Analysis by Rank and Sex
The average nine-month salaries by gender and rank are:
Female Assistant: $73,041.56
Male Assistant: $78,123.09
Female Associate: $79,320.14
Male Associate: $86,406.27
Female Full: $100,874.65
Male Full: $117,569.93
To do a statistical analysis, we use the log of the salaries, because of the skewed distribution.
Let yi be the log(9-month-salary) for the ith faculty member, i = 1, . . . , 1045. Let
r1i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a female assistant professor, and d1i = 0 otherwise
r2i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a male assistant professor, and d2i = 0 otherwise
3
r3i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a female associate professor, and d3i = 0 otherwise
r4i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a male associate professor, and d4i = 0 otherwise
r5i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a female full professor, and d5i = 0 otherwise
r6i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a male full professor, and d6i = 0 otherwise
We use the model:
yi = 1 r1i + 2 r2i + 3 r3i + 4 r4i + 5 r5i + 6 r6i + i , i = 1, . . . , n,
where we assume that 1 is the true average log-salary for women assistant professors at CSU, and the
other coefficients are defined similarly. The term i is a random error or more accurately variation
that is unexplained by gender and rank.
The coefficients can be interpreted as follows: exp(2 1 ) is the ratio of male assistant professor
salaries to female assistant professor salaries, across CSU. The estimates of these are:
exp(2 1 ) = 1.059, meaning that male assistant professors make 5.9% more than female assistant
professors.
exp(4 3 ) = 1.096, meaning that male associate professors make 9.6% more than female
associate professors.
exp(6 5 ) = 1.162, meaning that male full professors make 16.2% more than female full professors.
If the i can be assumed to be independent and approximately normal with mean zero and common
variance, then the p-values for various t-tests are valid. We perform three (separate) two-sided t-tests:
H0 : 1 = 2 versus Ha : 1 6= 2 : p = .045
H0 : 3 = 4 versus Ha : 3 6= 4 : p < .0001
H0 : 5 = 6 versus Ha : 5 6= 6 : p < .0001
The multiple R2 is .378, indicating that 37.8% of the variation in log(salary) at CSU is due to rank and
gender.
was insignificant. This means that the salary ratios for the gender/rank combinations are approximately
the same across departments.)
The department effect is highly significant, with 81.0% of the variation in log-salary explained by rank,
gender, and department. We can perform the same hypothesis tests to get p-values for the differences
in salary by gender, for each rank, after the department effect is controlled for:
H0 : 1 = 2 versus Ha : 1 6= 2 : p = .91
H0 : 3 = 4 versus Ha : 3 6= 4 : p = .81
H0 : 5 = 6 versus Ha : 5 6= 6 : p = .0002
After controlling for department, we find that there is no significant difference between male and female
assistant professor salaries at CSU, and also no significant difference between male and female associate
professor salaries. However, exp(6 5 ) = 1.068, meaning that male full professors make 6.8% more
than female full professors, and this is quite significant as well as substantial, although the department
effect explained much of the discrepancy in full professor pay.
Analysis by Rank and Sex, Controlling for Effect of Department and Seniority
We have two measures of seniority in the data: years at CSU and years since degree. The average years
since degree for female full professors is 25 years, compared to 28 years for male full professors. We
expect pay to go up as ones career progresses, so we need to account for seniority when comparing
salaries.
The relationship of log salary to years since degree would be linear if the salaries increased by approximately the same percentage every year. However, academic salaries tend to increase faster than this,
with bumps for promotion, merit pay increases, and increases when the faculty member moves to a
different university, or perhaps just threatens to. Using modern nonparametric methods, we can model
this trend as simply smooth and increasing, to avoid problems with parametric mis-specification.
The relationship of log salary to years at CSU, once years since degree is controlled for, is actually
decreasing. This is because faculty members who move typically receive large salary increases. Our
new model is:
yi = 1 r1i + + 6 r6i + 1 d1i + + 53 d53i + f1 (x1i ) + f2 (x2i ) + i , i = 1, . . . , n,
where x1i is the years since degree for the the ith faculty member, and x2i is the years at CSU for the
the ith faculty member. The function f1 is smooth and increasing, while the function f2 is smooth and
decreasing. The estimates of the functions are shown in Figure 1.
Now, exp(6 5 ) = 1.046, meaning that male full professors at CSU make 4.6% more than female
full professors at CSU, after effects of department and seniority are accounted for. The p-value for
H0 : 5 = 6 versus Ha : 5 6= 6 is p = .002, indicating rather strong significance. The multiple
R2 tells us that 83.5% of the variation in log(salary) is explained by the predictors: rank, gender,
department, and the two kinds of seniority.
Residual Analysis
Some standard residual plots are shown in Figure 2, showing heteroskedasticity with respect to the
rank/sex variable, and some left-skewness with heavy tailed residuals.
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Figure 3: Plots of weighted residuals for final model, using weights from the rank/sex categories.
We can correct for the heteroskedasticity by weighting, using a weight vector equal to the inverse of the
variance of the residuals in each of the six rank categories. Plots of the weighted residuals are shown
in Figure 3, showing a substantial improvement, but still slightly heavy-tailed. The results by gender
are virtually the same as for the unweighted model; there is no difference in any of the conclusions.