Women and minorities earn less at Cal Poly, but the university is improving pay equity

Women are generally paid less than men at Cal Poly, and ethnic minorities are paid less than white employees, a Tribune analysis of university salaries shows.

But Cal Poly is making gains on several fronts and has improved over the past five years in building a more diverse workforce while ensuring that employees are paid equally, according to data obtained via a public records request sent to Cal Poly in July 2020.

In fact, in some areas, average salaries for people of color exceed those of their white counterparts.

Legally, the university cannot pay an employee more or less based on their gender or ethnicity. Salaries must be based on factors such as experience and job type.

To protect identifying personal information, the university broke the data down into salary ranges ($15,000-$30,000, $135,000-$150,000, etc.) and showed the number of employees per salary range unless there were fewer than 10 employees in that range, ethnicity or gender group.

“Clearly, we want to have equal representation in all of our jobs,” said Al Liddicoat, Cal Poly’s vice provost for academic affairs and personnel, and interim dean for the Orfalea College of Business. “And we’ve tried to do that for many years, we’ve got a lot of efforts going to try to recruit diverse faculty.”

This is the second story in the Tribune’s ongoing coverage on pay equity in San Luis Obispo County.

In December, the Tribune took a similar look at Cuesta College employee salaries, and found that women employees are generally paid less than their male colleagues at the community college.

Men earn more than women at university

Across Cal Poly, men are paid higher wages than women, salary records show.

In 2020, about 15% of women were paid more than $105,000, while about 31% of men were paid more than $105,000.

However, that gender gap in salaries has narrowed in recent years, according to data the university sent to The Tribune.

Over the past five years, the share of women making over $105,000 has tripled.

In 2015, about 5% of female employees were paid more than $105,000 annually, while 12% of male workers were paid more than $105,000 at that time.

The shift toward more employees receiving wages of greater than $105,000 at Cal Poly is also due to the university increasing wages to account for rising living costs in San Luis Obispo, according to Liddicoat.

White Cal Poly employees paid more than minorities

Looking at the salary-by-ethnicity data provided by the university, white employees are generally paid more at Cal Poly than Asian and Hispanic or Latino employees.

There were not enough Black employees or employees of any other ethnicities working at Cal Poly for the university to release their salary data, the university said.

According to the university’s data, in 2020, about 26% of white employees were paid more than $105,000, while about 22% of Asian employees and 6% of Hispanic or Latino employees were paid more than $105,000.

As with gender, the equity gap in salaries by ethnicity has narrowed substantially in the past five years.

In 2015, about 11% of white employees were paid more than $105,000, while no Asian or Hispanic or Latino employees were paid more than $105,000 at that time, according to the university data.

There may have been some Asian or Hispanic or Latino employees paid more than $105,000 a year in 2015, but the data provided to the Tribune did not disclose salary ranges when less than 10 employees of a certain ethnicity were paid within that range.

After the Tribune requested an interview with university staff about the data, Cal Poly provided more data showing average salaries in 2020 broken down by the university’s collective bargaining units — such as faculty, health care support, police, clerical and administrative support services and management personnel.

“Only looking at the university’s numbers broadly paints an incomplete picture,” Cal Poly media relations director Matt Lazier wrote in an email to The Tribune. “For a more accurate representation, it is important to look at numbers broken down by the university’s collective bargaining units — in other words, comparing salaries for similar kinds of work.”

The additional data provided to The Tribune show that though there are still equity gaps in some areas, they are generally much smaller when looking at each bargaining group.

For example, white faculty members at Cal Poly are paid, on average, $104,634 annually, which is slightly less than Asian faculty members, who are paid $104,789 on average, according to university data.

Faculty members who are Black, American Indian or Alaska Native or Hispanic or Latino, are paid $101,048 on average, according to Cal Poly’s data.

White management personnel — those working in the deans’ or president’s offices — are paid, on average, $123,588 a year. Management employees who are Black, American Indian or Alaska Native, or Hispanic or Latino, are paid $135,687 on average, according to the data.

How working groups compare by gender

Across all working groups at the university, men are paid more than women, according to Cal Poly’s data.

Overall, men at Cal Poly are paid an annual salary of $90,448, compared to $76,491 paid to women on average, according to the university data.

In some categories, the salary gap between male and female employees is minute. Men working in academic advising are paid, on average, $56,450, while women in the same job category are paid $56,383 on average, according to the university data.

In other areas, the equity gap is more pronounced.

The largest gap involves management personnel. On average, men working in that field are paid $129,309 while women are paid $118,159, according to the Cal Poly data.

Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong is the highest paid employee at the university, earning $456,396 in 2020. His annual salary far exceeds that of other management personnel.

Of the top-20 highest-paid positions at Cal Poly, 12 are held by men, according to salary data.

Male faculty members are paid $107,330 on average, while women in faculty positions are paid $98,144, according to the data.

What Cal Poly is doing to address pay equity gaps

Disparities in how much men are paid over women or white employees are paid over other ethnicities show up for a variety of reasons, Liddicoat said.

“It’s probably not enough to get to equity until you can get equity into some of these really difficult-to-hire regions,” Liddicoat said. “Some of the most difficult are the faculty ranks because the minimum requirement (to be hired at Cal Poly) is a PhD, and if you look at the demographics of the PhD graduates it’s not representative of the country.”

Additionally, Liddicoat said some of the highest-paid faculty positions at Cal Poly are in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics and business fields. Fewer women and fewer people of color are entering those fields compared to the number of men and white people, he said.

Liddicoat said the university is working to recruit a diverse range of candidates for jobs by improving the recruiting, interviewing and hiring process to ensure there are no unconscious biases that could cause some employees to be filtered out.

Often, Liddicoat said the university advertises open positions directly to associations such as the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers or Society of Black Engineers. This helps ensure a diverse field of candidates applies to jobs at Cal Poly, he said.

In 2019, Cal Poly hired 16 new employees in its first “diversity cluster hire.”

“To promote inclusive teaching strategies across the university and increase curricular coverage of areas related to diversity and inclusion, a university-wide cluster of tenure-track faculty search was launched,” the university’s website says. “These faculty will contribute to the university’s diversity and inclusion goals in their departments and colleges, the university and the community.”

The university received about $10,000 per employee from the California State University system to help fund those positions, Liddicoat said.

Cal Poly has also implemented what Liddicoat called “equity increases” in the past by bringing up employee salaries to meet the local cost of living.

“When we looked at people, we weren’t looking at names or gender. We were looking by discipline and rank and time” worked at Cal Poly or other institutions, Liddicoat said, to ensure that “if there were any biases, they would have been fixed by that.”

At a large university like Cal Poly, which has about 1,500 employees on campus, Liddicoat said it will take a long time to change the overall demographic.

Cal Poly hires 20 to 70 tenure-track employees each year, he added.

“I think some (people) sort of imagine that you could just go in and fix this easily by identifying women and underrepresented minorities and just adjust their salary,” Liddicoat said. “But it’s not something where you can do that. You can’t base people’s pay or hire people based on those things. And so it’s a complex process.”

Search our database for Cal Poly employee salaries from 2019 and 2020

The Tribune has put together a database of Cal Poly salaries. You can search for any employee using the search bar, or click on the column titles to sort them.

If you can’t see the database, click here.

This story was originally published April 26, 2021 at 1:15 PM.

Mackenzie Shuman

The Tribune

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Mackenzie Shuman primarily writes about SLO County education and the environment for The Tribune. She’s originally from Monument, Colorado, and graduated from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in May 2020. When not writing, Mackenzie spends time outside hiking and rock climbing.