Editor’s note: The Daily Illini is following up the Salary Guide published March 9 with a two-day series looking at the effects of race and gender on faculty salaries. Today’s story discusses the topic of race and how the University is beginning to study its effects with a statistical salary analysis. Tomorrow’s story will cover the topic of gender and what can be done to correct inequalities during the current budget crisis.

Starting Monday, faculty will be able to change the data the University has collected about their race and ethnicity. However, the new data will not be recorded in time to be considered in a study that analyzes faculty salaries and determines whether race and gender are significant factors in pay rates.

A draft report is due to be released in late April, with the final version hopefully being released in late May, said Carol Livingstone, associate provost and director of the Division of Management Information, which is conducting the study. Designed to be conducted every year, the faculty salary equity regression study has not been completed since 2004. Beginning the study again at this time is significant, Livingstone said, because of the changes in information about faculty members’ race and ethnicity.

“We’re going to have probably inconsistent data and data that will be difficult to deal with for quite awhile, especially as faculty members have the opportunity to list themselves under multiple races or multiple ethnicities,” Livingstone said. “(Race is) not going to be a simple variable anymore. It’ll be a more complex set of variables.”

Because it is already underway, the 2010 study will use current racial and ethnic data — as well as information about a faculty member’s rank, department, gender, promotion dates and time since earning his or her highest degree — to determine which of those factors have an influence on salaries.

Factors of salaries

Faculty salaries are subjective and based on multiple factors, so it is difficult for faculty to determine whether their race or gender is causing their pay to be lower than their peers’, said Menah Pratt-Clarke, assistant provost and associate director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Access. Factors including negotiation skills and higher demand for faculty in certain positions complicate the process of setting salaries, she said.

“It becomes difficult to be able to say it was based on a discriminatory factor,” Pratt-Clarke said. “That doesn’t prevent people from thinking it is.”

University administration does not micromanage faculty salaries but lets each department set them based on market factors, said Barbara Wilson, vice provost for academic affairs. Researchers have looked at the issue of pay equity from economic and sociological perspectives, finding perceived and real inequalities can arise from the value society places on work done by minority and women faculty, said Aparna Joshi, associate professor of labor and employment relations.

“We include (race) as a part of the regression and see whether that is a significant term affecting salary,” Livingstone said. “It shouldn’t be, but that’s why we check.”

Erik McDuffie, assistant professor of African American studies and gender and women’s studies, said minority faculty sometimes feel they are not fairly compensated for the additional challenges they face, such as dealing with intersecting thoughts about race, socioeconomic status and culture in the classroom.

“I just don’t think you can put a monetary value on the extra work that faculty of color have to deal with,” McDuffie said. “Racial disparities in salaries I imagine are real, are salient.”

Updating salary equity data

The salary equity study, now underway, is working to sort through years of data about promotions, awards and raises to determine each faculty member’s true 9-month salary. This requires checking information from the University’s banner system online with departments to confirm its accuracy, Livingstone said. The Division of Management Information, or DMI, ran into so many inconsistencies in 2005-06 when trying to conduct the salary equity study that it released a preliminary version but never completed the report.

“It’s basically just gathering all the information from the different databases,” said Ting Lu, assistant director of the DMI, who is in charge of conducting the study. “We’re still getting the data cleaned up.”

Although this year’s study will require extra work, Livingstone said it will be easier to study salary equity in the future if the DMI conducts the study every year, as it plans to. In the past, she said this study has found some salaries that appear to be unequal based on inappropriate factors such as race.

“I would anticipate that we will certainly find some pockets where there are problems. I’d hope that there aren’t any,” Livingstone said. “But, you know, it’s a big university, and I can’t say that absolutely every salary decision that’s been made in the last five years has been a good one.”

Despite the University’s deficit in state funding, Joshi, who has researched salary equity issues in corporations, believes now is an important time to determine whether faculty compensation is being influenced by discriminatory factors.

“It’s a good time to revisit the issue given that it’s a tough time financially,” Joshi said.

“But this is a public university and we have a certain commitment to achieve equity at all times.”