Resisting Gendered Salaries

While the college claims that it values all of the disciplines that make the liberal arts so vibrant, they clearly construct a hierarchy in the pay grade.  As a private institution we are extremely secretive regarding salary issues; however, we openly admit that Economics, Computer Science, and Arabic necessitate a “market-based premium” and are consequently the highest paid disciplines on campus.  Since these fields are male dominated, do they inflate statistics of gender bias in faculty salary, or in fact do they reinforce and further perpetuate the ill founded devaluation of women’s work?

With the industrial revolution the labor force became gendered into what we now view as “traditional” gender roles.  Instead of working on the family farm, men began to take jobs in cities, assuming their responsibility as breadwinner, and women stayed home to take care of the kids and complete the housework: men’s work was paid, women’s work was not.  Of course gendered occupations are heavily raced and classed as well.  Black men have continually faced limiting social conditions that make it exceedingly difficult to integrate into the labor force.  The racist critique of the black family as matriarchal has been used historically for us to abandon social support mechanisms in favor of futile policy that encourages marriage.

Since a horrible economy has made it increasingly more difficult to live on one income, a persistently growing number of households have more than one provider; however, men still make more money than women.  As a society we will never let a women’s job exceed the pay of that of a man, we are constantly involved in the devaluation of their work.  “Official explanations” for salary discrepancies of Economics, Computer Science, and Arabic keep us from asking why the markets are so situated in the first place.  It is not that the market demands a premium for these fields which just happen to be dominated by men, but rather it is precisely because they are dominated by men that such a premium is granted. 

Should we really care to have the greediest professors or should we rather strive to attract those academics with a dedicated passion towards teaching?  What if we hired the kind of economists who are critical of increasing income inequality instead of in support of it?  Taking the appropriate stance on these issues would dramatically shake up the demographics of our departments, providing us with diverse and invigorating perspectives that inspire us through the compassion of educators committed to liberation.

For some reason our market-based logic fails to hold up on the student end.  Why is it that we are not presented with a differential pay grade based on our major?  The college blatantly undervalues most of our disciplines and it is time that we reflect such back to them to demand equitable pay for all of our professors instead of perpetuating commonsensical groundings for an oppressive pay scale.  For all future tuition bills we must pay only 80 percent with a stipulation that the remaining balance will linger empty until the school stops treating our professors as such.  Let us mobilize and act collectively with our peer institutions.  With enough joining this movement our schools cannot possibly fail to listen.  Together, in solidarity, we shall resist rather than collude in the oppression. 

- the Gadfly