Racial Inequities in Canadian Academia: The Case for Examining Within Discipline Variation

Racialized faculty often earn less than their white counterparts due to a lifetime of structural, social, and institutional inequities presenting barriers to success within a given university. This research aims to explore the mechanisms and processes that help to explain the expected residual differences in income for faculty based on race, gender, and discipline. Focusing on one Southwestern Ontario university, I control for several factors such as faculty members' salaries over 5 years, year of graduation, type of degree, rank, type of employment, number of job changes, appointment, gender, visible minority status, and citations. Publicly available data was compiled from the 2016-2020 Ontario public sector salary disclosure list, faculty websites, CVs, Google Scholar profiles, and LinkedIn. Findings showed variation in income among disciplines by race, with racialized faculty earning more in the sciences compared to the arts. Addressing this gap in the literature will have future implications for research, EDI initiatives, and policy intervention. By using a different methodology than previous research, this study can help address and mitigate some of the limitations found with using self-reported and survey data.