The Salary Anomaly Working Group’s Analysis & Findings were released on August 3, 2016. The Working Group had been given two tasks:
- to investigate all cases where faculty salary inequities, including but not limited to gender-based inequities, may exist and recommend how such cases should be resolved using the Faculties' existing anomaly funds; and
- to review the processes by which salary anomalies are currently identified and resolved in each Faculty, and establish a standardized university-wide process for the detection and resolution of all faculty salary anomalies that may arise in future, wherever they may occur.
Individual anomalies
In the final analysis, 71 individuals were identified as potential anomalies. Of those 71 individuals, 59 are considered by the Working Group to be certain anomalies, as there was nothing in their career path that could account for the aberration in their actual salaries and the fitted/predicted salary outputted from the regression model. The regression model accounts for the individual's observed employment history including actual average merit ranking from up to the past six years. There are an additional 12 individuals for whom the Working Group felt unable to determine whether they were truly anomalous and they are to be investigated further by the Provost’s Office.
Analysis based on gender and rank
Of the 71 total cases identified, 30 of them are women (of a total population of 344 women in the dataset; so 9% of all women) and 41 are men (of a total population of 827 men in the dataset, so 5% of all men). Eight of the 71 cases are lecturers (continuing or definite-term) and 63 cases are in the professorial ranks (tenure-stream or definite-term).
In addition, after the 71 cases were identified, the regression model was re-run after the individual salaries were adjusted by the recommended amounts. After this adjustment, it was determined that there still existed a systemic gendered anomaly of $2905 in favour of male faculty members.
Current Faculty anomaly processes
In terms of the current processes used to identify and resolve salary anomalies at the Faculty level, it was determined that the only shared practice across all six Faculties is consideration of all cases where individual faculty members self-identify as having an anomalously low salary. Beyond this, it is apparent that Faculty practices vary in scope (Faculty-wide vs partial review) and analytical approach (regression plotting versus informal review).
Process recommendations
The Working Group’s key recommendations are that the Deans of all Faculties should review all salaries in their Faculties annually for anomalies and, most importantly, because annual Faculty-level anomaly reviews may fail to identify inequities that may be developing across the university as a whole, the Working Group recommends that a university-wide anomaly review be done regularly for both men and women faculty, including lecturers, using the regression model developed for the 2015-2016 review. The interval should be long enough to allow the system to detect anomalies as they develop, but short enough to allow corrections to be applied in a timely manner (the Working Group recommends every five years).
Read more
Full Salary Anomaly Working Group Report (PDF)
Frequently Asked Questions about the 2015 Salary Anomaly report