Women's representation and the gender pay gap: rank, institutional research intensity and ethnicity in UK business schools

We employ a multi-faceted framework to explore the importance of women’s representation to the gender pay gap (GPG) in all UK business schools to analyse an authoritative and complete administrative sample from the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA). We find that women’s representation is a valuable concept in pay inequality research, although it is not deterministic. The GPG is shown to be significantly higher in research-intensive universities and the male-dominated professoriate, where pay is individually determined, than among more gender-balanced non-professors, where pay is collectively bargained. Consistently, women academics in research-intensive universities have lower representation and the greatest GPG (but the highest pay) compared to those in post-1992 universities. We find a pay hierarchy for professors by discipline and note that white men make up 67% and women only 23% of the professoriate. Making visible intersectional inequalities, we show that intersecting gender and ethnicity reveals a more consistent adjusted pay gap across rank and university type than gender for Asian women, with Black women unfailingly earning the least. Moreover a low GPG is not tantamount to equal pay and may relate to lower pay, and a high GPG with high pay. The chapter also points to the urgent need to address the gender/ethnicity gap.