Female Professors Earn 23% Less Than Male Peers, Publishing More Doesn’t Close Gap, Study Shows

At universities across America, equal pay has been argued over for decades. A new study of faculty salaries inside one of the country’s largest public university systems lands on a finding worth a close look: female professors in the social sciences earn far less than their male colleagues, and the gap holds even when women publish just as much research.

Researchers examined salary and research-output records for faculty across all ten campuses of the University of California system, covering pay from 2014 to 2020. The work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), undercuts a common assumption, namely that the gender pay gap in academia mostly reflects differences in experience, rank, or productivity. Account for all of those, and a gap still remains. In some fields, it survives even after comparing women against men who are just as accomplished and just as productive.

American women broadly earn about 83 cents for every dollar men earn, according to national figures cited in the study. Among highly educated, similarly ranked professors doing the same jobs at the same institutions, with access to the same public salary data, the pattern is nearly as wide. A raw pay gap of 23% separates male and female social science faculty. The team tested one explanation after another: field, campus, when a career started, rank, how much someone published, and how often their work was cited. A stubborn gap was still there.

A Gender Pay Gap That Survives Every Explanation

To build the study, researchers combined three kinds of data: public University of California salary records, publication and citation counts from an academic database called Scopus, and a name-based tool that assigns gender to faculty. Together, these covered more than 1,400 social science and business school faculty tracked over several years.

Researchers then added explanations one at a time to see how much of the 23% raw gap each could account for. Controlling for a professor’s field, campus, and the year their career began cut the gap sharply, down to about 4.3%. That drop shows much of the overall gap traces back to women clustering in lower-paying fields or campuses.

Adding job rank, publication count, and citation counts barely moved things. Around 4% held firm. Being a full professor rather than an assistant didn’t explain it. Publishing more didn’t explain it. Getting cited more didn’t explain it. A statistical breakdown found that about 17% of the original gap couldn’t be tied to anything the researchers measured, a share present among junior and senior faculty alike. That portion can’t be pinned directly on discrimination, but it does raise questions about what is driving the rest.

More Women in a Field Won’t Close the Gender Pay Gap

One of the most surprising results concerns the link between how many women work in a field and how fairly those women are paid. Common sense might say fields with more female faculty would pay women more equitably. Data pointed the other way.

Anthropology, for instance, had close to equal numbers of male and female faculty in the UC system during the study period, yet female anthropology professors earned only about 93 cents for every dollar their male counterparts made. Economics, a field where women made up less than 20% of faculty, showed no detectable gap at all. Business, Sociology, and Anthropology carried persistent gaps favoring men, while Economics, Political Science, and a catch-all group of smaller fields showed none once measurable differences were accounted for. As the authors put it, “equal pay does not depend on equal representation.”

Researchers point to field-specific culture and structure, things like how salaries are set and how research quality is judged, as likely mattering more than headcount. In Economics and Political Science, more centralized and standardized pay-setting may leave less room for the case-by-case discretion where bias can slip in. In Sociology and Anthropology, where scholars more often produce books than journal articles and output is harder to compare directly, there may be more room for subjective judgment, and more room for gender to quietly shape pay.

A Publishing Gap, but No Citation Gap

On average, female faculty had about nine fewer publications than male peers before any adjustments. Even after accounting for career length, rank, and field, a gap of roughly five and a half publications remained. That is a real difference.

Citations told a different story. Citations track how often other scholars reference someone’s work and often stand in for research impact. A raw gap existed, but once the team compared like with like, it vanished. Female social scientists are not cited less than comparable male peers.

Why Pay Transparency Alone Won’t Fix the Gender Pay Gap

Throughout the study period, the UC system posted salary information publicly for anyone to look up. Many advocates argue that openness should shrink pay gaps, since employees can see what colleagues earn and push back. An unexplained gap persisted anyway. Compensation there is a matter of public record, and female professors in several fields are still paid less than comparably productive, comparably ranked men.

That leftover gap isn’t simply about women choosing lower-paying paths or publishing less, since those factors have already been stripped out. What remains may come down to informal norms, negotiation dynamics, and evaluation habits that shift from one field to the next. Which of those matters most, and why outcomes differ so sharply across departments, is a question the authors say still needs answering.

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