Ann Brower and Alex James

Evidence from all NZ universities suggests PBRF scores do not explain away the gender pay gap in NZ universities. From 2003-12 a woman’s odds of achieving the rank of Professor or Associate Professor were half a man’s, even controlling for PBRF score and age.

This creates a difference in lifetime pay for two people with similar research performance. We call it the gender performance pay gap. In science fields, it averaged NZ$200,000 – about 40% of an average Christchurch house. In medical fields, it’s a whole house.

In sum, we found 3 gender gaps:
1) an average lifetime pay gap, not controlling for age or PBRF score, of about 80% of an average house,
2) a performance gap in which women score about 50 points (of a possible 700) lower on PBRF on average, and
3) a lifetime performance pay gap of nearly half a house.

Soon we will be able to analyse the 2018 PBRF data, to see if anything has changed. Stay tuned. And our study is in an open access journal. Check it out: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0226392