The Narrowing Gender Wage Gap Among Faculty at Public Universities in the U.S

Abstract

We study the conditional gender wage gap among faculty at public research universities in the U.S. We begin by using a cross-sectional dataset from 2016 to replicate the long-standing finding in research that, conditional on rich controls, female faculty earn less than their male colleagues. Next, we construct a data panel to track the evolution of the wage gap through 2021. We show that the gender wage gap is narrowing. It declined by more than 50% over the course of our data panel to the point where by 2021, it is no longer detectable at conventional levels of statistical significance.