CSU gender gap: 60% of lowest-paid faculty are women
As CSU works to equalize pay for women at the top of its teaching ranks, a deeper look at the university's gender gap shows female faculty are far more likely to fill lower-paid roles than their male colleagues.
Colorado State University, like many institutions in the country, is in a struggle to counteract decades of workplace gender inequity. The most recent blows take the form of a study confirming that female full professors — the highest of three tiers of faculty — were being paid less than their male peers and a "troubling" report on female faculty members' workplace experiences.
The latter report, based on surveys of 76 women who self-selected to participate, portrays many seeing the university as a place where an institutionalized gender inequity has taken hold.
A deeper look by the Coloradoan into CSU's workforce shows that inequality is present beyond female workers' concerns of sexist insinuations and managers' inconsistent application of parental leave policies. It extends to the lack of female faculty among the university's highest instructional ranks.
The issue is certainly not unique to CSU, which is pushing back against generations of accepted gender norms and equity expectations. Not that those circumstances make the situation OK, advocates and administrators say.
"It's been this way for many years throughout higher education, and maybe forever," said Sue Doe, a tenured English professor at CSU and a director at the Center for the Study of Academic Labor, adding that conditions have improved somewhat. "I don't think we're unusual in that way. I don't think it makes it right."
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Fewer than one-third of CSU's 430 full professors are women. Full professors at CSU earn an average annual salary of $132,000, almost $40,000 more than the next-highest tier, according to CSU's employee fact book.
About 43 percent of the 361 middle-rank associate professors are female, and women make up 45 percent of the university's 251 lowest-ranking tenure-track positions as assistant professors.
That male-to-female ratio flips among CSU's non-tenure track, or adjunct, positions. Women make up nearly 60 percent of that faculty pool, which earns an average annual salary of $58,000 for jobs that are most dependent on temporary contracts and most prone to change.
It’s a paradigm not lost on members of the university's fastest-growing faculty group.
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“The university couldn’t run without adjuncts,” said Chryss Cada, an instructor with the journalism department. “So it’s kind of like, ‘We don’t have to take this, you guys.’ ”
Cada sent a blistering letter about her pay, dated Labor Day 2016, to administrators ranging from university President Tony Frank to her department chair. In it she described teaching as an act of charity, and one she loved even as she struggled to justify it as anything more than “exploitation.”
Cada wrote that she had received an offer letter of $40,000 for a 9-month appointment, equal to teaching four classes; her actual pay ended up being half that as she has a two-class load.
Cada's first paycheck took her on a quick trip off cloud nine. While the offer "said the work I do with students has real value,” the actual pay for what turned out to be a part-time position introduced Cada to a status quo of what she called “near minimum wage” compensation for the amount of work she does.
“I find it difficult to explain why I work with such dedication for such little compensation,” she wrote. “I find it difficult to explain to my students and my own daughters, because I would never want any of them to be exploited this way.”
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Cada's sentiments were similar to those in the March report on female faculty perceptions of life at CSU. It featured anecdotes of gender-based bias that CSU president Tony Frank called "troubling" and "disturbing." The report also stated that gender inequity disproportionately affected non-tenure track faculty.
'Research is valuable; teaching is not'
CSU officials explain the key discrepancies across the ranks — that female professors aren't represented proportionally at the highest ranks and make up a sizable majority of the lowest ranks — as the result of decades of culture and gender expectations.
More women are coming out of doctoral programs and graduate schools now than 30 years ago, Frank said. That's reflected in CSU's growth in female tenure-track professors generally: Women made up 30 percent of that faculty pool in 2007-08 academic year and are up to 37 percent in the current academic year.
For the proportion of adjuncts, departments that most typically rely on that faculty also tend to attract the most female faculty, Provost Rick Miranda said.
"It's a very complicated set of issues, with a complicated array of different dimensions associated to the problems," Miranda said. "I don't deny there are big issues to address here."
Jenny Morse, the chair of the Faculty Council's committee on non-tenure track faculty, said she sees gender inequity in play across the university, where teaching — the priority for many adjunct faculty members — is seen as "women's work," secondary in importance to the more than $330 million in research performed annually at CSU.
"There's a real culture here that research is valuable," Morse said. "Teaching is not."
While acknowledging that difference, she rejects the notion that qualifications alone separate the adjunct from the tenure-track. Many adjunct professors, herself included, hold doctorate degrees in their fields.
Her committee and other sympathetic faculty members have been working on proposals they hope will add more stability to adjunct life and help erase a feeling of being disposable. The proposals include creating a new rank of more permanent, instruction-oriented faculty that would receive more regular pay raises and standardized evaluation.
In short, it's a process that would make long-term adjunct faculty feel more like members of the university community.
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One of the issues highlighted in the campus climate report on female faculty was a lack of protections for grievances and general fear of reprisal for workers critical of their managers. Several adjunct faculty members declined to speak with the Coloradoan for this story citing that same concern. Of the 76 female faculty who participated in the campus climate report, 30 were adjunct faculty.
Morse, who holds an adjunct position, said a thriving side business, a multiyear contract and visibility on campus affords her enough security to speak out. Even then, she notes that the class she teaches could simply disappear.
"It's in their best interest to keep us disposable because of funding reasons," Morse said. "But then it's not (in their best interest) because of the climate it creates."
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An issue of economics
Frank said he's had an eye on adjunct faculty issues since his days as provost almost a decade ago. Now CSU's president, he self-deprecatingly jokes that the last provost didn't do a good job moving that needle.
"We the administration, I the president, don't feel good about the way we're treating our non-tenure track faculty members,” Frank said Monday in an interview with the Coloradoan.
Frank was familiar with Cada’s letter and nodded in recollection of her use of the word "exploited." He said the university doesn’t want anyone to feel that way, and described efforts in line with what Morse and her adjunct committee wants.
Use the dropdown bar below to find the pay breakdown of different departments at CSU.
Those efforts include raising the base pay rate for adjunct faculty, tying it to tenure-track salary increases and eventually bringing it closer to that of a full-time, entry-level tenure-track professor. He also noted success in allowing multiyear contracts for adjunct faculty.
Frank describes the issue of addressing adjunct faculty's working conditions as one not just of equity, but also of economics.
CSU, like the most public universities, has seen the state portion of its budget continuously shrink, or at least fail to keep up with its needs, since the Great Recession sacked Colorado's budget. Growth in student population and related fee and tuition revenue keep the books balanced.
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But more students require more faculty. And since at least 2008, CSU has largely met that need by bolstering its ranks of lower-cost, adjunct faculty.
CSU has added more than 265 adjunct faculty members since 2008, a growth rate of almost 54 percent. Comparatively, it's added just more than 100 tenure-track faculty members, a growth rate of about 11 percent. Meanwhile, total enrollment at the university grew by 4,600, or more than 16 percent, to almost 33,200 students.
Adjunct faculty have gone from one in three faculty members to more than 40 percent of CSU's instructional ranks since 2008. As the university grows, they will almost certainly be the first teachers to work with new students.
"If (a non-tenure track faculty member) feels valued as a member of the academic community, they feel they’re fairly compensated, they feel they're treated well, they feel that what they do matters, that'll come off a certain way,” Frank said. “And if they feel like the university is taking advantage of them, and they're poorly paid, and poorly treated, and there's a certain inequity in what they do, that will reflect itself in this first experience, too.
“We can undo three years of efforts in the first 15 minutes of class if we're not careful.”
Fast fixes sought for long-running issues
Frank predicts that CSU will continue to rely on growth in its adjunct ranks as enrollment increases. Increasing the university's number of tenure-track positions to cover a need for additional professors would lead to “real fiscal problems,” he said. He aims to maintain similar ratios to what exist now, for both total faculty to students and adjunct versus tenure-track positions. He also aims to continue the push for equity across all ranks.
Frank said he hopes the legacy of the two recent reports on gender equity is that CSU proves it is taking related issues seriously, and has been ever since the specter of pay inequity at the university was raised by a statistics professor in 2014.
Some of the problem will solve itself over time; Vice Provost Dan Bush notes that CSU's most male-dominated ranks include tenured professors with decades of service, meaning they will be the first to start seeing retirements and more advancement opportunities for diverse hires. But that doesn't mean the university will or should say "take a breath and wait 30 years" for gender balance to be realized at the university's highest ranks, Frank said.
Some improvement efforts are relatively simple, such as providing better training for department chairs, who fill a somewhat entry-level manager position in university life. Standardization of department chair training was one of the recommendations from the gender climate report, and adjunct professors are already quick to note that management can make a huge difference in quality of life for workers at the university.
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Leslie Stone-Roy, an adjunct assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, said her experience has been generally positive as she's gone from post-doctoral fellow to research scientist to, in a relative rarity for an adjunct faculty member, assistant professor.
It wasn't until she joined the adjunct faculty committee that she started hearing "upsetting" stories about treatment of women and adjunct faculty. In her college and department, she describes women publishing just as much work as men, taking on as many administrative duties and being treated with respect at meetings.
For adjunct faculty, it's hard to tell who's who, with everyone generally being so busy, Stone-Roy said. That said, there's not total parity.
"(Tenure-track faculty) are guaranteed a job, and I'm not really guaranteed a job," she said, adding, "but I don't feel like I'm going to be fired at any minute."
She also feels like she hit somewhat of a wall in career growth, or at least a spot where she doesn't have a clear path forward. Stone-Roy recalls earlier in her career, and around when she started a family here, that if she wanted tenure she'd have to leave CSU. She chose to stay in the Choice City.
"That's not a CSU thing, that's a culture thing," Stone-Roy said, referring to academia writ large. "If you're going for tenure, you're expected to move around a bit."
Doe, of the Center for the Study of Academic Labor, noted that women in general often need to choose between family and career advancement.
University professors are held to high standards of productivity, tenure or not, Doe said. She noted that CSU is working to improve things like maternity leave and has extended the deadline for tenure-track professors to secure tenure if they have a family.
"But at the end of the day, women do pay a price when they step away from their jobs to manage these complex situations," she said. "I'd like to say all of that is behind us, with the women's movement being many many decades behind us, but it's not."