Projecting Grid Compression to Reduce Gender Salary Gaps

This paper examines the effects of grid compression on gender-based salary gaps. In this case, the workplace setting is a large Canadian research university previously found to have both a positionally segregated cohort of academic staff and a persistent gender-based differential in their salaries....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Relations industrielles (Québec, Québec) Québec), 2020-01, Vol.75 (3), p.526-546
Main Authors: Brown, Laura K., Troutt, Elizabeth
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic staff
Careers
Closure
Collective bargaining
Colleges & universities
Comparable worth
Compensation
Employees
Employers
Fairness
Females
Gender
Gender equity
Gender pay gap
Institutions
Labor market
Labor relations
Projections
Research centers
Segregation
Simulation
Wages & salaries
Women
Work
Workplaces
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Summary:This paper examines the effects of grid compression on gender-based salary gaps. In this case, the workplace setting is a large Canadian research university previously found to have both a positionally segregated cohort of academic staff and a persistent gender-based differential in their salaries. The annual salary grids at this institution underwent seemingly subtle compressions over the course of two decades, with within-rank compression largely confined to the first decade and across-rank compression confined to the second decade. We employ a simulation methodology to check whether the two types of compression reduce the salary gap to varying degrees. After deflating staff salaries back to the start of each decade, we project the salaries forward using the historical annual increases and grids in place in each year at the university. We compute the gap present in the salary distribution at the start and end of each decade in the simulation, and check whether the gap decreased more across one decade than the other. We find that across-rank compression of the institution’s salary grid during the second decade narrows the salary gap to a greater extent than the within-rank compression of the earlier decade. Our work demonstrates that employers using stated salary grids could use simulation to monitor the equity effects of their pay policies and shows that they could accelerate the closure of gaps through consciously altering relationships among pay levels at different points in the grid’s hierarchy.
ISSN:0034-379X
1703-8138
DOI:10.7202/1072346ar