College of Arts & Sciences

Kathryn Victoria Ryan

Pennoni Honors College

Custom-Designed Major: Actuarial Science

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Xiaoming Song Mathematics

A Comparison of Men and Women Salaries at Public Universities

Research conducted by AAUW showed that on average, women were paid 80% of what men were paid in the US in 2016. Our study looked at the average salaries of assistant professors divided by gender in the year 2016 for 105 different public colleges within PA, NJ, NY, DE, and MD to determine if a gender salary gap exists here. Data was gathered from data.chronicle.com, which collects all of its faculty pay data from the US Department of IPEDS. Comparisons were made using hypothesis testing with H0: men and women have the same average salary and Ha: men have a higher average salary than women. After constructing normal probability plots, it was determined that both sets of data for men and women showed approximate linearity, which means that both men and women salaries display an approximate normal distribution. Thus, using a 95% significance level with μ = $70,748.45 and σ = $12,125.14 for men and μ = $68,254.54 and σ = $10,989 for women, a z test was conducted. The z-test resulted with a z-value of 1.56 and a p-value of .0594. Since the p-value is larger than α = .05, it can be concluded that men do not have a significantly larger salary than women at public colleges as assistant professors within these states.