Women, especially women of color, are missing among the high-earners at many research universities in the US, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
A new report from the Eos Foundation and elsewhere examined data for the highest-paid positions at 130 universities, splitting those positions into three categories: core, medical center, and athletics. They found that women hold less than a quarter of those highly compensated core positions, which include faculty, dean, provost, and other roles.
They further found that women of color are particularly underrepresented in these high-earning positions — Black women make up 0.8 percent of high earners, while Asian women and Hispanic women make up 0.6 percent and 0.8 percent of high earners, respectively.
Additionally, the report notes that science, technology, engineering, and medicine fields as well as business and economics account for 93 percent of the highest-earning faculty members, but women are only 10 percent of the top-earning faculty.
"Much work has focused on getting women into STEM and business fields, yet, to achieve gender and racial parity among faculty pay in our lifetimes, we need an urgent look at the higher-level systemic bias within the market for faculty which, from a pay perspective, devalues fields that traditionally have more women and underrepresented minorities," the report says