Faculty Composition and Pay Equity by Tenure Status, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity
CUPA-HR’s signature surveys collect data on composition and pay equity on all higher ed administrator, faculty, professional, and staff positions. To explore trends in composition and pay equity for custom comparison groups or specific positions, subscribe to DataOnDemand.
For more detailed analysis on faculty composition and pay equity by discipline, see the report: Representation and Pay Equity in Higher Education Faculty: A Review and Call to Action.
Faculty information includes data for tenure-track faculty and non-tenure-track teaching faculty. These interactive graphics depict composition and pay equity by gender and race/ethnicity for higher ed faculty over time.
Composition of Faculty by Tenure Status, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity
Key Findings: Generally, the representation of faculty of color and women has gradually increased over the years in both tenure-track and non-tenure-track positions. Notably, women continue to be better represented in non-tenure-track than in tenure-track positions. Among tenure-track faculty, the proportion of women and faculty of color decreases with each promotion in rank. This means that women and most faculty of color are over-represented in the lowest-paying and lowest-ranking faculty positions. The data show that the only group that has greater representation with each increase in rank is White male faculty, and this pattern has persisted over time.
Navigating the Charts: Click the labels in the legend to select or deselect specific data in the graphic. Slide the circle side-to-side in the bar to change the year.
Median Pay Ratios for Faculty by Tenure Status, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity
Key Findings: White female tenure-track faculty at both assistant and associate ranks experienced improvements in pay equity in the past year, increasing from $0.97 to $0.99 compared with their White male counterparts. This means that, within rank, both women and faculty of color are essentially paid at or above equity.
Pay ratios for non-tenure-track faculty have changed very little since last year. Although Black, Hispanic/Latina, and White women continue to be slightly underpaid compared to White men, all groups are close to being paid equitably.
Tenure-track faculty often see substantial salary increases at only two points in their careers — once when they are promoted to associate professor and again when they are promoted to full professor. When there is bias in promoting women and faculty of color to successive ranks, as our data continue to show, this results in career earnings gaps that far exceed what is often detected in pay equity studies within rank for a given year. In contrast, non-tenure-track faculty, who often do not have rank-based promotions, may experience more consistent annual salary increases and more static salary trajectories.
Navigating the Charts: Slide the circle side-to-side in the bar to change the year.
Methodology
Data were collected in CUPA-HR’s Faculty in Higher Education Survey with an effective date of November 1 of each academic year. (For these charts, the academic year is denoted with the last part of the year, e.g., 2024 is academic year 2023-24). Analyses include only non-profit institutions of higher education; each year of data includes data from at least 683 colleges and universities and over 210,000 full-time faculty.
In calculating pay ratios, median salaries by race/ethnicity, sex, and rank (tenure-track faculty only) for each faculty discipline were obtained; then, the median of those medians was calculated by race/ethnicity and sex. Finally, each group’s median salary was divided by the median salary of White men to calculate the pay ratio. This controls for the fact that women and faculty of color may be represented differently in specific disciplines that pay higher or lower salaries, and it means that the wage gaps present are not explained by the fact that women or people of color may have greater representation in lower-paying disciplines.