Pay Transparency and Pay Inequity

Scholars Tomasz Obloj (HEC Paris) and Todd Zenger (University of Utah) recently published a study of pay transparency in the US academic workplace. The paper was published in Nature Human Behaviour (10.1038/s41562-022-01288-9) and the authors also publicly deposited their data and code (10.3886/E155541V1). The study merged salary information obtained via FOIA requests to faculty rosters and productivity metrics provided by Academic Analytics. The study explored whether “staggered shocks” (the time when salary information was made publicly available online) had a relationship with pay equity. The authors found that pay transparency resulted in greater pay equity (“the fairness and consistency with which an institution or department allocates pay to individuals”) and pay equality (“the equivalence of pay,” e.g. between men and women). Interestingly, “pay for performance” (e.g., performance-based salary) show the opposite pattern; in the author’s words, “Pay transparency prompts those allocating pay to weaken the link between observable performance metrics and pay” and “the financial rewards linked to observable performance metrics as well as rank advancement substantially decline after wages become more transparent.”

By |2022-02-25T14:36:59+00:00February 25, 2022|Uncategorized|0 Comments

Video Playback: AARC Researchers Explore Honorific Awards

On Thursday, February 10, 2022, AARC scholars presented about recently studied winners of academic honorific awards. The study included 14,139 awards, ranging in scope from Nobel Prizes to scholarly societies’ “Outstanding Young Researcher” and explored a variety of research questions. The presenters reviewed their findings and answered questions from participants.

By |2022-02-11T19:48:26+00:00February 11, 2022|Uncategorized|0 Comments

The “quantification” of the Social Sciences

AARC Senior Researcher Bill Savage and I recently published an article in PLOS ONE documenting changing publishing practices in the social sciences. In short, social scientists are, by and large, publishing more journal articles and fewer books than they were a decade ago. The trends we observed are much stronger than we anticipated - journal article publication has increased as much as 64% between 2011 and 2019, while book publication is down as much as 54% in the same period, with some variation across disciplines. The publication patterns of social science fields are becoming more similar to those of STEM areas, and less similar to the humanities.

By |2022-02-04T14:47:53+00:00February 4, 2022|Uncategorized|0 Comments
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