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Rewarding Collaborative Research: Role Congruity Bias and the Gender Pay Gap in Academe

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Abstract

Research on academic pay finds an unexplained gender pay gap that has not fully dissolved over time and that appears to increase with years of experience. In this study, I consider how role congruity bias contributes to this pay gap. Bias is more likely to manifest in a context where there is some ambiguity about performance and where stereotypes are stronger. I predict that bias in the attribution of credit for coauthored research leads to lower returns to research for female professors. To test this prediction, I use a sample of Canadian faculty in accounting, where research is typically coauthored, where females are underrepresented at the most senior ranks, and where many universities evaluate merit in research, teaching, and service to determine salary increases. In regressions of salary on individual and institutional determinants of salary, I find that women earn marginally less than men. However, the pay gap is only evident for women who publish in a selective list of journals; for the subset of faculty with no publications from this list, there are no significant differences in salary. For researching faculty, the pay gap relates specifically to research productivity. While women publish less on average than men, the returns to their research are also lower. In particular, the relation between the individual’s research ranking and salary is significantly lower for women who publish a higher proportion of their work with men, than for all other faculty. Additional analysis of salary and coauthor patterns confirms that women receive significantly less credit for coauthored articles they publish with men than those they publish with other women but that no similar variations in reward are evident for men across publishing patterns. These findings suggest bias in the attribution of credit for coauthored research in the determination of salary, consistent with role congruity theory, and provide an important potential explanation for why salaries for women vary systematically from those of men even after considering productivity. Providing lower rewards for equal work represents a continuing ethical issue in academe and compounds the challenges women already facing in the profession.

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Notes

  1. Many studies use the terms “gender” and “sex” interchangeably, whereas Borna and White (2003) and Hardies and Khalifa (2018) advocate for more precise use of the terms in the literature. Sex describes a person’s biological status and is typically categorized as male, female, or intersex, whereas gender is culturally and socially constructed relating to traits like masculinity and femininity. In this paper, I examine differential rewards depending on an individual’s sex and I use “sex” to describe whether an individual in the sample is male or female. The role congruity bias that I consider for explaining differences in salary between men and women arises from gender stereotypes where certain “masculine” traits, such as assertiveness, and certain “feminine” traits, such as concern for others, are attributed differentially to men and women. That is, gender stereotypes do not reflect how men and women actually are, but rather how we think men and women differ from each other (Ellemers 2018). I use the term “gender pay gap” to be consistent with the large literature on the topic.

  2. Many countries, including the U.K. do not publicly disclose academic salaries. An advantage of the Canadian context is that Canadian universities are public institutions and a number of provinces require the public disclosure of faculty salaries on an annual basis. Further, in Canada, publicly available collective agreements specify the determination of salary increases and typically include the evaluation of merit in research, teaching, and service through an annual/biennial merit assessment process as a component of pay.

  3. While agreements rarely include cost of living adjustments or consumer price index references explicitly, considerations of inflation are generally reflected through negotiated base increases. Career progress increments are generally granted so long as performance is “satisfactory.”

  4. Because merit increases are not negotiated, per se, they are less likely to be impacted by differential negotiating power between men and women. Negotiation is more likely a factor in the determination of starting salaries where salaries may be subject to a range, floor, or ceiling but where there is often discretion in amount. However, merit increases will be affected if men are more likely to appeal their assessments than women.

  5. Sarsons (2017) rules out statistical discrimination as an explanation for her findings. If promotion and tenure committees take coauthoring as a weaker signal of productivity, then returns to coauthored work should be lower for both men and women. However, this is not the case. Men receive similar returns for publications regardless of whether they are solo-authored or coauthored.

  6. Only salaries above a threshold, typically around $100,000, are required to be disclosed. The province of Alberta changed its requirements to include university salaries starting in 2016, and therefore Alberta is not included in the 2015 sample. Other provinces do not provide salary information, and in Quebec disclosure of public salaries is illegal under privacy laws.

  7. The sample includes five universities from Nova Scotia, three from British Columbia, and 14 from Ontario. This predominance of Ontario universities may limit the generalizability of the findings if Ontario differs from other provinces in its collective bargaining. Also, to the extent that published salaries include additional work for the institution (e.g., teaching in executive programs on overload), this will add noise to the model and likely reduce the research productivity/pay relation.

  8. This database is publicly available and can be searched by university and individual faculty member. See: http://www.byuaccounting.net/rankings/indrank/indrankings.php.

  9. This distribution across rank is broadly similar to that of the Hasselback sample of 452 faculty where the percentages of female representation for Assistant, Associate, and Full are 32%, 40%, and 28%, respectively. In a U.S. setting, Fleischmann et al. (2017) report 43% female faculty at the assistant level and 27% at the associate/full level in their survey of academic accounting faculty career satisfaction.

  10. The journals included on the BYU ranking are as follows: Accounting, Organizations, and Society (AOS); Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory (AJPT); Behavioral Research in Accounting (BRIA); Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR); Journal of Accounting & Economics (JAE); Journal of Information Systems (JIS); Journal of Accounting Research (JAR); Journal of Management Accounting Research (JMAR); Accounting Horizons (AH); Journal of the American Taxation Association (JATA); Review of Accounting Studies (RAST); and The Accounting Review (TAR).

  11. See: https://www.byuaccounting.net/rankings/univrank/studydescription.php. Accessed February 7, 2019.

  12. If the productivity of women in the sample is understated relative to men because of their different research interests, the coefficient for the interaction variable FEMALE*BYU_RANKING should be biased upwards, opposite to the effect predicted.

  13. Almer et al. (2013) report adjusted R2 ranging from 36 to 48%.

  14. An alternative measure for the school’s research productivity is the BYU ranking of the school itself. The correlation matrix indicates that PHD_GRANT and SCHOOL_BYU_RANKING are highly correlated (correlation coefficient of 0.79). When PHD_GRANT is replaced with SCHOOL_BYU_RANKING, the results are highly similar to those reported in Table 4. The coefficient for the school BYU ranking is positive and highly significant in explaining salaries, and the results for differential returns to research productivity for females remain unchanged.

  15. Results are based on untrimmed data. When outliers are removed based on large Cook’s Distance values, results remain unchanged.

  16. While the use of the BYU list of journal publications provides greater consistency across faculty for journal quality, it excludes journals in which accounting faculty regularly publish that are also of high quality. Further, there are faculty who are excluded from the “publishing” list who do, in fact, publish. If women are more likely to publish in journals outside of the BYU list than men, they are more likely to be excluded from the publishing sample. This could limit the generalizability of the findings if these women are rewarded fully for their work with men that is published in these journals.

  17. The opposite could also be true, however, where students include their supervisor’s name to their own work in the course of their thesis work.

  18. This test assumes that journal quality and paper quality are highly linked. Of course, some high-quality journals publish low-quality articles and some very high-quality papers are rejected from the top journals and are eventually published elsewhere. So long as there is a reasonably high correlation between journal and paper quality, this test should adequately capture quality differences.

  19. Several schools in this study had collective agreements that included discussions of anomaly adjustments and processes to identify gender-based salary differentials.

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Acknowledgements

I thank the editor, Steven Dellaportas, two anonymous reviewers, Changling Chen, Madison Hendricks, Khim Kelly, Carol Marquardt, Pat O’Brien and Julia Shen for providing helpful comments. I am also grateful for the research funding provided by the University of Waterloo Gender Equity Grant Program and the School of Accounting and Finance Centre for Accounting Research and Education. I also thank Elizabeth Vachon, Qianyu Zhang, and Chunmei Zhu for providing excellent research assistance.

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    Christine Wiedman

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Appendix: Variable Definitions

Appendix: Variable Definitions

Variable name

Variable definition

SALARY

12-month salary reported on public disclosure lists

FEMALE

An indicator variable that equals 1 for females, and 0 otherwise

BYU_RANKING

The research rankings from the BYU research ranking website for 2014, reverse coded

ASSOC

An indicator variable that equals 1 for faculty at the rank of associate professor, and 0 otherwise

FULL

An indicator variable that equals 1 for faculty at the rank of full professor, and 0 otherwise

CHAIR

An indicator variable that equals 1 if the faculty member serves as the Chair of the Department or equivalent, and 0 otherwise

YEARS

The number of years since the faculty member graduated with their last degree

PHD_GRANT

An indicator variable that equals 1 if the faculty member is employed at an institution that grants PhDs in accounting

NAMED_BSCHOOL

An indicator variable that equals 1 if the faculty member is employed at a named business school

#_PUBS

The number of publications from the BYU research ranking for 2014

HMIX_FEMALE

Female faculty above the median for the percentage of their papers that are coauthored with males

LMIX_FEMALE

Female faculty below the median for the percentage of their papers that are coauthored with males

#NON-MIX PUBS

The number of single-sex-team and solo publications

#MIX PUBS

The number of mixed-sex-team publications

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Wiedman, C. Rewarding Collaborative Research: Role Congruity Bias and the Gender Pay Gap in Academe. J Bus Ethics 167, 793–807 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04165-0

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