Monitoring gender remuneration inequalities in academia using biplots

Abstract

Gender remuneration inequalities at universities have been studied in various parts of the world. In South Africa, the responsibility largely rests with individual higher education institutions to establish levels of pay for male and female academic staff members. The multidimensional character of the gender wage gap includes gender differentials in research output, age, academic rank and qualications. The aim in this paper is to demonstrate the use of modern biplot methodology for describing and monitoring changes in the gender remuneration gap over time. A biplot is considered as a multivariate extension of an ordinary scatterplot. Our case study includes the permanent fulltime academic staff at Stellenbosch University for the period 2002 to 2005. We constructed canonical variate analysis (CVA) biplots with 90% alpha bags for the five-dimensional data collected for males and females in 2002 and 2005 aggregated over faculties as well as for each faculty separately. The biplots illustrate, for our case study, that rank, age, research output and qualifications are related to remuneration. The CVA biplots show narrowing, widening and constant gender remuneration gaps in diffferent faculties.

Keywords: alpha-bag, academia, biplot, canonical variate analysis, gender inequality, multivariate, wage gap.

ORiON Vol. 24 (1) 2008: pp. 49-73