Ok. So maybe women are paid less overall. So what does that prove? Maybe they are less senior? Maybe they have positions that are different with greater time commitments and responsibilities. Maybe the women are part time. Maybe they are less productive or not great teachers? And yes—all those explanations are possible. I dove deeper and took a look at how my salary compared to men and women who were similarly situated at that time: colleagues at my level of seniority. All of us had recently earned tenure—a tough thing to achieve and a bar that several colleagues recently failed to meet. We all started with in a span of a couple years although I came to this profession with many more years of experience in practice.
Here is what I found when I identified those closest in experience to me:
One of the men is senior to me—the other two are junior. The two bars marked “me” and “W2” are the women. So I showed this to my dean. Because I’m wired for positivity, I thought that maybe he’d see that the two women in this group were not treated like our male colleagues.
If he would look at our professional performance and the pay disparity, he’d see there was a disconnect, and either help us understand where our performance was deficient or fix the pay disparity, right? Perhaps my data was wrong or perhaps I selected the wrong people as similarly situated . . . but seniority and job description seemed the most logical way to pick the comparators, right? As so often happens in life, none of the expected outcomes occurred.
If you were my employer, what would you have done if presented with this evidence? What if you were my colleague? Or one of my students? Or law school alum in a position of power and influence? What would you have counselled me to do if I was your friend, your professor, your daughter?