Faculty Salaries: Is There Discrimination by Sex, Race, and Discipline? Additional Evidence

Abstract

In a recent paper in this Review, Nancy Gordon, Thomas Morton, and Ina Braden (G-M-B) presented a model of facultv salary determination and results of an empirical test of their model. In this paper I present results of a replication of their study using data from another institution and results from tests of alternative models. Faculty salary differentials can be explained in part by differences in individuals' characteristics. Jacob Mincer has stated that differences among individuals in their stock of human capital (for example, level of education, years of work experience) explains much of the variation in their earnings. College and university administrators claim that faculty salary depends on productivity in the areas of teaching, scholarship, and service. Differences in demand conditions among disciplines suggest including department or school among the factors thought to determine faculty salaries.' There is no consensus among economists on a definition of labor market discrimination. G-M-B have an implicit definition of discrim;nation contained in their model. Their defiritioni of labor market discrimination is that the sex differential in salary which is unexplained by differences in individual characteristics of age, seniority, education, rank, race, and discipline is due to sex discrimination. I propose a different definition of discrimination in that I omit rank as one of the relevant characteristics. Sex discrimination may occur through slower promotion rates for females than for males, in which case rank itself would reflect discrimination. 2 I had access to a set of data from another institution, comparable to the G-M-B data. The two institutions are both large Ph.D. granting universities with similar faculty size. The variables in both studies are the same. In Table 1, empirical results of a test of the G-M-B Model I using the new data set are presented alongside the G-M-B empirical results. Model I is as follows:

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