The infamous “Salary Gap” has been making the rounds on social media and in this year’s Democratic debates. Its most quoted version is this: “Women make 77 cents for every dollar men make.” This factoid is slightly misleading, and I recommend that you listen to the recent Freakonomics podcast on the issue. The basic premise of the podcast is that women do different work from men that allows them increased flexibility to care for their families, resulting in lower salaries. Obviously, this societal expectation that women be primary caregivers is an outdated notion that feminism seeks to address, but it is not the focus of this column.
Every year, The DePauw releases a slightly edgy article about DePauw’s Form 990, bemoaning President Casey’s compensation and comparing it to that of secretaries. This form requires the University to release its top eleven salaries in an effort to provide some accountability.
Although a good—and IRS-mandated—step, I believe that the Form 990 does not do enough to give DePauw students, employees and stakeholders information about who receives the spoils of our tuition and endowment dollars. Thus, the school should open its payroll data for all employees and make that information public.
What purpose does this serve? First and foremost, it will allow DePauw employees to compare their compensations. In America, talking about salary is taboo. Asking people outside of your immediate family how much they make is the pinnacle of rude prying. The reason this practice is so unpopular is due to employer pressure.
Suppose you interview for a job at the School of Music. They offer you $20,000 a year plus relocation. A desperate Oboe Performance graduate student, you accept, happy that you finally have a job. What you didn’t know is that the Music School actually had $30,000 a year available to pay you, but they lowballed you and saved money due to your fear of discussing monetary matters. When your friend, a Music Historian, says that $20,000 isn’t enough to support her family, the School then offers the $30,000. Due to the taboo of salary, there is no way to know that you have been stiffed on $10,000 of yearly income.
By making salary information public, DePauw would then be forced to compensate its employees equally for the same work or risk the underpaid employees’ departures. This, of course, creates the distinct possibility of conflict between staff, which is one of employers’ stated reasons for keeping salary information private. What will female professors do when they find out they make less than their male peers? Will the Classical Studies department feel taken advantage of if they discover that their harder-to-recruit Economics peers make $5,000 more than them? How might white professors react to the revelation that DePauw compensates their minority peers at a higher rate due to the difficulty of attracting talented professors from underrepresented minorities to Greencastle, IN?
These are not easy questions to answer, and the ensuing fights might be reason enough to keep salary information private. Nevertheless, if we want to address the problem of pay inequality between different groups, it is essential that DePauw and its employees have all information available to them. The administration should open the books to ensure that all employees are compensated fairly. Equal pay for equal work.
McMurtry is a senior computer science and English literature double major from Covington, Kentucky.