[A] This work, though, were relatively small-scale. Now, a much larger
study has found that discrimination plays a role in the pay gap between male and
female scientists at British universities.
[B] Besides pay, her study also
looked at the "glass-ceiling" effect -- namely that at all stages of a woman's
career she is less likely than her male colleagues to be promoted. Between
postdoctoral and lecturer level, men are more likely to be promoted than women
are, by a factor of between 1.04 and 2.45. Such differences are bigger at higher
grades, with the hardest move of all being for a woman' to settle into a
professorial chair.
[C] Seven years ago, a group of female scientists at the
Massachusetts .Institute of Technology produced a piece of research showing that
senior women professors in the institute's school of science had lower salaries
and received fewer resources for research than their male counterparts did.
Discrimination against female scientists has cropped up.
[D] Sara Connolly, a
researcher at the University of East Anglia's school of economics, has been
analyzing the results of a survey of over 7,000 scientists and she has just
presented her findings at this year's meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science in Norwich. She found that the average pay gap between
male and female academics working in science, engineering and technology is
around £ 1,500 ($ 2,850) a year.
[E] To prove the point beyond doubt, Dr
Connolly worked out how much of the overall pay differential was explained by
differences such as seniority, experience and age, and how much was unexplained,
and therefore suggestive of discrimination. Explicable differences amounted to
77% of the overall pay gap between the sexes. That still left a substantial 23%
gap in pay, which Dr Connolly attributes to discrimination.
[F] That is not,
of course, irrefutable proof of discrimination. An alternative hypothesis is
that the courses of men's and women's lives mean the gap is caused by something
else; women taking "career breaks" to have children, for example, and thus
rising more slowly through the hierarchy. Unfortunately for that idea, Dr
Connolly found that men are also likely to earn more within any given grade of
the hierarchy. Male professors, for example, earn over £ 4,000 a year more than
female ones.
[G] Of course, it might be that, at each grade, men do more work
than women, to make themselves more eligible for promotion. But that
explanation, too, seems to be wrong. Unlike the previous studies, Dr Connolly's
compared the experience of scientists in universities with that of those in
other sorts of laboratory. It turns out that female academic researchers face
more barriers to promotion, and have a wider gap between their pay and that of
their male counterparts , than do their sisters in industry or research
institutes independent of universities. Private enterprise, in other words,
delivers more equality than the supposedly egalitarian world of academia
does.