Gender earnings gap and glass ceiling at Spanish universities

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing the gender gap in salaries observed in Spanish public universities. It focuses on the glass ceiling problem and quantifies its importance in the gender earnings gap. This article shows that most of the gender earnings gap observed among the faculty of the University of Murcia is due to a glass ceiling problem in accessing the rank of Full Professor, and it includes a measure of research productivity in the analysis. Despite increases in the number of women promoted to the level of Full Professor has increased in recent years, women still comprise less than 30% of the total faculty at this academic rank. The second most important variable that explains most of the earnings gap is research productivity.

JEL classification:

• J31
• J7

Keywords:

• Wage discrimination
• occupational segregation
• glass ceiling

Reviewing Editor:

• Reza Gholami, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Subjects:

• Gender Studies - Soc Sci; Labour Economics; Econometrics; Sociology of Education

Notes

1 Chen and Crown (2019) quantifies this problem for The Ohio State University, but they do not have measures of research productivity of university faculty.

2 In Spain, the pioneering econometric study of the gender pay gap used data from a small sample of faculty at the University of Valencia, which revealed a wage gap of 16.9% (Moltó, 1984).

3 There is a rank with a very small weight called Catedrático de Escuelas Universitarias in Spanish university faculty that is expected to be eliminated as well, and is assimilated to Associate Professor A.

4 Bosquet et al. (2019) obtain a similar result for academic economists in France.

5 Part-time faculty in this dataset is a specific rank apart from the rest; they do not receive research salary supplements or seniority bonuses and are hired on a temporary basis.

6 The wage equations can yield separate estimates for men and women, which are available upon request.

7 The promotion is a double process: first you have to obtain the ANECA certification and then win the competitive examination for the position created by each university. The University of Murcia creates these positions according to its budget and the teachers with ANECA certification.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pedro J. Hernández

Pedro J. Hernández is an Associate Professor of the Department of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis at the University of Murcia. His research areas include the gender pay gap; returns to education; product quality, exports and wages; and the firm size and exports.