Reporter Alicia Santiago has the well-researched report here, covering the successful discrimination lawsuit by Prof Jennifer Freyd (Psychology), as well as new complaints by Patricia Lambert (PPPM) and Margaret Sereno (Psychology.
The Emerald has also posted a convenient database of salaries here, from UO’s IR pdfs – which used to be updated quarterly but are now done only haphazardly. You’ve got to go quite a ways down before you get to the faculty:
Didn’t we do an expensive gender equity study complete with consulstants (Berkely Associates) and didn’t the study end up paying out just a handful of raises for equity related issues?
Correct.
Discretionary pay is a recipe for discrimination. I’d suggest at the very least a department salary report be glued to the desk of every department head, dean, and AVP making these decisions to at least have the opportunity to be confronted with their own bias. This business of making people compare and contrast salary reports and only addressing those who make a fuss doesn’t quite foster a happy healthy workplace. I wonder how this shakes out for OA’s…
Thanks Bill, for sending the database link. UO’s salary structure is chaotic. There are limited ways to correct for pay inequities (no step system, no pay equity pool, no reasonable process to adjudicate pay equity claims) and the University doesn’t want to support an equity pay raise in the on-going contract negotiations. As far as I know, currently the only way to receive an equity pay raise is filing a claim with UO’s Department of Investigations and Civil Rights Compliance (good luck here!) and when going through promotion to associate or full professor, or a full professor 6-year review. The pay structure in my department is terrible: flat at the assistant rank, negative at the associate rank, and a huge range at the full rank. Right now, there’s no way to fix this. No way to give equity raises to deserving members of the department. There’s also a lack of transparency. How many cases are filed with UO’s Department of Investigations and Civil Rights Compliance, and how many of these are successful? How are equity raises triggered and determined at promotion?
The database is wrong. Some salaries are up to and others are a couple years behind.
There’s another way for an equity raise to occur out-of-cycle directly, no pools, but I don’t know if you would consider it a ‘reasonable process.’ A department head can put forward a petition to a Divisional Dean (or Dean) for assessment and transmission to the Provost. Since tenure a decade ago I had been way out of whack with others at my rank and with my length of service, and although it took them six months to make a decision (which they made less than 24 hours after telling me they were reviewing my file, huh) they did at least elevate me to the next lowest paid colleague who was senior to me, about an 11% raise. It was surprising they moved so fast, but not surprising that they saw the legal exposure and that they only went as far as necessary to fix the inversion. The result was clearly designed to be just enough to make it extremely difficult to sue (and unlikely to recover much even if I won), but it was easily the biggest raise in dollars and in percentage that I’d received since I got here way back when.
Unfortunately you can’t apply to the Provost directly if you wish to do this; it’s got to go through channels and I believe your head and dean(s) must lay out the case, and their assessments, because you can’t write the letter. They also won’t redress past inequity, only going forward, and they wait until June (after hirings, tenure, promotions) to consider these cases. But it does indicate that they can make equity raises outside of review cycles, especially to forestall action under OEPA. They also use this vehicle to make substantial retention raises–the admin sometimes classes those as ‘equity adjustments’ because quite often they are, even though it took an outside offer to trigger them. That last part didn’t happen to me, but it has happened to colleagues.
So yeah, one can approach a unit head with an equity complaint, and something can come of it without having to go through litigation. It’s not as effective in terms of possible redress, but it’s less messy, and you can still go to litigation if the results are lacking.
Regarding the database, I don’t know what it’s based on since the University hasn’t published salaries yet this academic year. The last publication was 6/30/2023. The data base also doesn’t list FTE.
Thanks, onager, for the information on out-of-cycle raise petitions. I’m guessing that most faculty and maybe even some unit heads don’t know about this, which is bad. I don’t see this process described anywhere (e.g., in the CBA). And, yes, with equity raises they give you just enough to avert action based on the OEPA and they don’t compensate for years of lost income.