The CSU Salary Equity Saga

Mary Meyer
Statistics Dept, CSU
In May 2014, Rick Miranda asked me to be on a task force, together with Sue James and Sue Doe,
to work with Laura Jensen and some IR staff to do a gender equity analysis of the salaries of regular
faculty. I got the data for FY2014 (and some earlier data) and did a fairly straight-forward statistical
analysis (documented in the appendix to this saga). In short, I found that while no systematic salary
discrepancies existed at the assistant and associate levels, once the effects of department, rank, years
since degree and years at CSU were accounted for. However, there was a significant gap at the full
professor level, and the largest gap was in the college of Vet Med.
I presented the results to the committee, then to Rick in July. I wanted to present the results to the
senior women faculty group, but he asked me to hold off until they could talk to Vet Med and see what
they had to say.
In early September I presented the results to the Diversity Symposium, which was also attended by
Laura Jensen. Shortly after this, the Coloradoan had an article that implied CSU was really on top
of equity issues, and mis-quoted Diana Prieto as saying there were no gender imbalances in salaries.
At this point there were some emails from women faculty sayingwe didnt appreciate reading it in the
paper before our group saw it/heard about i which I totally understand, but my input or analysis
was not consulted; I didnt know about the article before it appeared.
Because of this, I decided to stop waiting for permission, and gave two presentations of the results. I
felt strongly (and I expressed this to Rick and Laura and everyone else) that all faculty had a right to
know how their salaries compared with others in their department, rank, and seniority, and announced
I was willing to send people their predicted values and residuals, along with interpretation.
So, I re-ran the analysis without the gender variable, and saved predicted values to each faculty member.
This is a sort of average (see appendix) salary for a regular faculty member, given department, rank,
and seniority. I could then tell individuals that their salary was 8% under, or 3% over, this average
value.
Laura then made an IR website (now taken down) with the predicted values from the same (I think)
analysis including the gender variable. (She called this predicted value a median.) This meant that
the median given for women full professors was considerably less than the median for a man with
the same department, rank, and seniority. Of course, I didnt know this at the time, but assumed
that she was providing the same information as I had been. Since she attended at least two of my
presentations, she certainly knew what I was doing.
Later that fall semester I met with Rick, Laura, and Dan Bush to discuss future analyses. I was willing
to turn this job over to IR, because I had provided documentation of the model, the steps in the analysis,
and the interpretation of the results. Its not that complicated! However, in this meeting I emphasized
that the analysis to determine if there is systematic gender inequity at CSU should be different from
that for the individual salary equity exercise, for which IR provides data every year. We discussed the
old method where there was a simple linear regression line for salary against years since degree, done
separately for each department. We agreed that this was too simplistic, and talked about better ways to
do it. We discussed some ideas, and I offered to be involved, but after that meeting I was not consulted
again.
Fast forward to last week. Here is an email that I sent on Thursday:

Dear Laura, Dan, and Rick,

Yesterday I was given the attached photocopy of some pages documenting the individual
salary equity exercise that is performed annually. I have some questions/issues about the
procedure.
First, the analysis that I did had the very specific purpose of comparing salaries at CSU
by gender. One of the first tenets of data analysis is that the method should be driven by
the purpose. However, the annual salary equity exercise has a quite different purpose. (We
discussed this in that meeting in Ricks office last fall.)
I feel like the statement that a senior CSU Statistics faculty member took the lead on
development of a new methodology is inaccurate, because I had no input on how this
annual exercise is conducted. In fact, I have strong objections to what is described in the
pages.
In my opinion, the calculation of the median salary (which is used as a target) should use
only rank, department, and years in rank, or if the latter is still not available, years since
degree. Including years at CSU in the model means that the target salary for folks who
have been at CSU for a long time is considerably lower than the target for someone who has
arrived recently, all other things being equal. Does CSU really want to have a policy that
loyal faculty should be paid less?
Also, in the document, it says that gender is also included in the model. I assume that this
is a mistake!! Having lower targets for women would not only go against everything weve
been talking about, but would (I hope) be illegal.
I have other questions about the methodology, but they are not policy-related. For example,
are data from departments combined to determine the median relationships between salary
and seniority, or are these done individually by department? What if, as in computer science,
the relationship between salary and years since degree is negative? Does the target decrease
with seniority as well, or is this held constant?
I would be happy to be involved with designing this annual exercise... I appreciate having
had input with last years gender equity study. I dont mean to complain or cause trouble, I
just want this to be done right. I feel that including years at CSU in the target will adversely
affect women more than men, and will also adversely affect those with families and ties to
the community.
Best, Mary
Well! It turns out that gender was included in the model, and that the target salaries for women were
less than for men, sometimes substantially less, all other things being equal. And equity raises were
declined because of this. At this point Jean Opsomer, Jan Nerger, and I raised a big fuss.
This is also when I asked Laura about the IR interactive website, and she (unapologetically) stated
that yes, mens medians were higher than womens, because thats what the model gave us. Because
she refused to see any problem with the website or the salary equity documents, thats when I emailed
the senior women faculty list-serve.
Since then, as you know, the IR documents have been rescinded, the website has been taken down, and
Diana Prieto is investigating.

Technical Appendix
The Data
There are 1045 observations representing tenured or tenure track faculty at CSU, presented to me in
an Excel file. The data set contains the following variables:
The response variable is the nine-month salary. There are several pertinent variables in the Excel
file:
ACTUAL SALARY, the yearly salary of the individual.
BOS, the basis of service. For the AY2014 data, this was either 9 or 12, reflecting the
months of service for the year.
NINE MONTH SALARY, calculated by IR. For the 9-month faculty, this is equal to actual
salary, but for the 12-month faculty, this is 81.8% of actual salary. I re-calculated the 9-month
salary to be 75% of the actual salary for the 12-month faculty.
GENDER, two levels
RANK: The three ranks are assistant, associate, full.
ASSIGNMENT DEPT: the department where the faculty member works. There are 54 departments, with 8 faculty members in the smallest (Ethnic Studies) and 64 in the largest (Clinical
Sciences).
ASSIGNMENT COLLEGE: the college where the faculty member works.
DEGREE YEAR: the year the faculty member received the PhD.
YEAR CSU: number of years as faculty at CSU.
Analysis by Rank and Sex
The average nine-month salaries by gender and rank are:
Female Assistant: $73,041.56
Male Assistant: $78,123.09
Female Associate: $79,320.14
Male Associate: $86,406.27
Female Full: $100,874.65
Male Full: $117,569.93
To do a statistical analysis, we use the log of the salaries, because of the skewed distribution.
Let yi be the log(9-month-salary) for the ith faculty member, i = 1, . . . , 1045. Let
r1i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a female assistant professor, and d1i = 0 otherwise
r2i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a male assistant professor, and d2i = 0 otherwise
3

 r3i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a female associate professor, and d3i = 0 otherwise
r4i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a male associate professor, and d4i = 0 otherwise
r5i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a female full professor, and d5i = 0 otherwise
r6i = 1 if the ith faculty member is a male full professor, and d6i = 0 otherwise
We use the model:
yi = 1 r1i + 2 r2i + 3 r3i + 4 r4i + 5 r5i + 6 r6i + i , i = 1, . . . , n,
where we assume that 1 is the true average log-salary for women assistant professors at CSU, and the
other coefficients are defined similarly. The term i is a random error or more accurately variation
that is unexplained by gender and rank.
The coefficients can be interpreted as follows: exp(2 1 ) is the ratio of male assistant professor
salaries to female assistant professor salaries, across CSU. The estimates of these are:
exp(2 1 ) = 1.059, meaning that male assistant professors make 5.9% more than female assistant
professors.
exp(4 3 ) = 1.096, meaning that male associate professors make 9.6% more than female
associate professors.
exp(6 5 ) = 1.162, meaning that male full professors make 16.2% more than female full professors.
If the i can be assumed to be independent and approximately normal with mean zero and common
variance, then the p-values for various t-tests are valid. We perform three (separate) two-sided t-tests:
H0 : 1 = 2 versus Ha : 1 6= 2 : p = .045
H0 : 3 = 4 versus Ha : 3 6= 4 : p < .0001
H0 : 5 = 6 versus Ha : 5 6= 6 : p < .0001
The multiple R2 is .378, indicating that 37.8% of the variation in log(salary) at CSU is due to rank and
gender.

Analysis by Rank and Sex, Controlling for Effect of Department

There is a lot of variation in salary among the 54 departments: the highest average 9-month salary is
$143,461 (Marketing) while the lowest is $48,248 (Library). We can model the department effect by
creating 54 indicator variables for departments, and adding 53 of these to the above model. Suppose
dji = 1 if the ith faculty member is in department j, and dji = 0 otherwise, for j = 1, . . . , 54. Then
our model is
yi = 1 r1i + + 6 r6i + 1 d1i + + 53 d53i + i , i = 1, . . . , n,
where now 1 is true average log-salary for women assistant professors in department #54, and 1 +j
is the true average log-salary for women assistant professors in the jth department, and ditto for other
rank/gender combinations. (I checked for interaction between the department and rank/gender, and it
4

was insignificant. This means that the salary ratios for the gender/rank combinations are approximately
the same across departments.)
The department effect is highly significant, with 81.0% of the variation in log-salary explained by rank,
gender, and department. We can perform the same hypothesis tests to get p-values for the differences
in salary by gender, for each rank, after the department effect is controlled for:
H0 : 1 = 2 versus Ha : 1 6= 2 : p = .91
H0 : 3 = 4 versus Ha : 3 6= 4 : p = .81
H0 : 5 = 6 versus Ha : 5 6= 6 : p = .0002
After controlling for department, we find that there is no significant difference between male and female
assistant professor salaries at CSU, and also no significant difference between male and female associate
professor salaries. However, exp(6 5 ) = 1.068, meaning that male full professors make 6.8% more
than female full professors, and this is quite significant as well as substantial, although the department
effect explained much of the discrepancy in full professor pay.

Analysis by Rank and Sex, Controlling for Effect of Department and Seniority
We have two measures of seniority in the data: years at CSU and years since degree. The average years
since degree for female full professors is 25 years, compared to 28 years for male full professors. We
expect pay to go up as ones career progresses, so we need to account for seniority when comparing
salaries.
The relationship of log salary to years since degree would be linear if the salaries increased by approximately the same percentage every year. However, academic salaries tend to increase faster than this,
with bumps for promotion, merit pay increases, and increases when the faculty member moves to a
different university, or perhaps just threatens to. Using modern nonparametric methods, we can model
this trend as simply smooth and increasing, to avoid problems with parametric mis-specification.
The relationship of log salary to years at CSU, once years since degree is controlled for, is actually
decreasing. This is because faculty members who move typically receive large salary increases. Our
new model is:
yi = 1 r1i + + 6 r6i + 1 d1i + + 53 d53i + f1 (x1i ) + f2 (x2i ) + i , i = 1, . . . , n,
where x1i is the years since degree for the the ith faculty member, and x2i is the years at CSU for the
the ith faculty member. The function f1 is smooth and increasing, while the function f2 is smooth and
decreasing. The estimates of the functions are shown in Figure 1.
Now, exp(6 5 ) = 1.046, meaning that male full professors at CSU make 4.6% more than female
full professors at CSU, after effects of department and seniority are accounted for. The p-value for
H0 : 5 = 6 versus Ha : 5 6= 6 is p = .002, indicating rather strong significance. The multiple
R2 tells us that 83.5% of the variation in log(salary) is explained by the predictors: rank, gender,
department, and the two kinds of seniority.
Residual Analysis
Some standard residual plots are shown in Figure 2, showing heteroskedasticity with respect to the
rank/sex variable, and some left-skewness with heavy tailed residuals.

10

20

30

40

0.1
0.0
-0.1
-0.2
-0.3

Centered component of log(sal)

0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0.0
-0.1

Centered component of log(sal)

50

10

20

Years since degree

30

40

50

Years at CSU

2
0
-2

sort(reshat/sd(reshat))

0.4
0.2

-4

-0.4

-0.2

0.0

residuals

0.0
-0.2
-0.4

residuals

0.2

0.4

Figure 1: Estimated effects of seniority on salary, using nonparametric constrained regression.

rank/sex combinations

11.0

11.5

12.0

predicted log(sal)

Figure 2: Residual plots for final model.

-3

-2

-1

qnorm(1:n/(n + 1))

rank/sex combinations

2
0
-4

-4

-2

sort(rescw/sd(rescw))

4
-2

residuals

4
2
residuals

0
-2
-4

11.0

11.5
predicted log(sal)

12.0

-3

-2

-1

qnorm(1:n/(n + 1))

Figure 3: Plots of weighted residuals for final model, using weights from the rank/sex categories.
We can correct for the heteroskedasticity by weighting, using a weight vector equal to the inverse of the
variance of the residuals in each of the six rank categories. Plots of the weighted residuals are shown
in Figure 3, showing a substantial improvement, but still slightly heavy-tailed. The results by gender
are virtually the same as for the unweighted model; there is no difference in any of the conclusions.