All female faculty at University of Waterloo get raises after gender wage gap discovered

All female faculty at the University of Waterloo are getting raisesa move the school's president says he hopes will not need to be repeated in the future.

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"I believe that with what we are doing, with our measures, and with our commitment, we are making a huge difference for it not to become, at least at the University of Waterloo, a systemic problem and give example to the others," Feridun Hamdullahpur said Monday morning in an interview with The Morning Edition host Craig Norris.

"We have made significant progress: The conditions, the university's attitude, everything that we're talking about are much different than they were before when we last conducted this study in 2008. So our approach right now is quite different."

'Inequities have crept back into the system'

In a memo to staff last week, university administration said all female faculty members would be getting a raise.

Every female faculty member employed as of April 30, 2015, will receive $2,905.

Aime Morrison, an associate professor of English at the school, said the good news was the working group that was created to look at the issue of gender wage gaps found the discrepancy.

The bad news was that this happened just eight years after the last report on the issue.

"Now in 2016, it turns out, inequities have crept back into the system," Morrison said.

"The problem must be structural, and it doesn't have to be intentional," she said, noting raises are partially based on merit.

She said ideally, she would like to see a working group look at the root causes of the problem.

"I know that at other universities, salary reviews are also periodic because there is this recognition that you can see it after it happens," Morrison said. "How these salaries split apart from each other is not clear."

"The causes are going to be very complex," she said.

Wage gaps a thing of the past

Hamdullahpur said the problem is one faced across the globe and coming up with the reason for it would be difficult.

He said the administration would rather focus on moving forward.

"When we addressthis, and when we have hiring practices that get everybody started at the right salary level, and we have a process at the university that has various bits and pieces, when you apply those fully, I don't think that we will need to go back and really try to understand this globally challenging issue," he said. "This is a problem that goes well beyond the boundaries of the university."

Five years from now, "we will look at it and I am quite hopeful that it will show us that we've been on the right track," he said.

Female faculty members can be "confident that the university is determined, the university is committed to ensure that two people doing exactly the same job will get equal pay. This will not happen at the university anymore, male or female. So this is our commitment."