Gender pay gaps in academia are well documented. The harder question is why they persist.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ) tested several leading answers to that question.
Co-authored by researchers from the University of California San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and Rady School of Management, the analysis covered faculty across all ten University of California campuses in anthropology, business, economics, political science, sociology and smaller social science fields grouped as “other.”
Overall, women faculty in the study earned 23% less than men. When the researchers accounted for field, UC campus and when faculty began their academic careers, the gap narrowed to 4.3%.
Testing the Productivity Explanation
Did the remaining gap reflect differences in scholarly output?
To find out, the researchers paired UC salary records with publication and citation histories drawn from Scopus author profiles. They also accounted for academic rank.
Faculty with more publications and citations tended to earn more. But adding academic rank, publications and citations did little to reduce the 4.3% gap.
“We tested one of the most common explanations for gender pay gaps in academia: that differences in pay reflect differences in measurable productivity. What we found is that productivity matters for pay, but it does not explain away the gender gap,” said Elizabeth Lyons, corresponding author of the study and associate professor at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy.
Transparency Alone Wasn’t Enough
Salary transparency is often proposed as one way to narrow gender pay gaps. The idea is simple: When people know what their colleagues earn, they may be better positioned to spot disparities and seek corrections.
The UC system offered a useful setting to test this idea because faculty salaries are already publicly available. Yet gender pay gaps persist. That’s not to say transparency has no value, the co-authors write, but it does suggest that public access to salary information alone is not enough to eliminate gender pay gaps.
Representation ≠ Pay Equity
One of the study’s surprises was how much pay gaps varied by field.
After accounting for observable differences, gender pay gaps persisted in business, sociology and anthropology. But the researchers found no statistically detectable pay gap in the smaller social science fields grouped as “other” or in political science and economics.
The contrast between economics and anthropology was especially striking. Women made up less than 20% of economics faculty in the study period, yet economics showed no detectable pay gap. In anthropology, where women and men were roughly equally represented, women earned about 93 cents for every dollar earned by men.
“Women’s representation in the faculty matters and deserves to be better understood, but it won’t necessarily fix the pay gap,” said Gaurav Khanna, a co-author of the study and professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy. “Representation does not necessarily predict pay equality.”
Why Field Differences Matter
The study does not identify a single fix. But the differences across fields give universities a place to look.
Economics and political science, for example, may have more centralized labor markets and more standardized ways of evaluating scholarly output. In sociology and anthropology, where books and monographs play a larger role, output may be harder to compare in the same way. Business fields may involve still other dynamics, including subfield composition, with men disproportionately represented in higher-paying areas such as finance.
“The variation across fields matters because it shows these gaps are not inevitable,” said Marta Serra-Garcia, a co-author of the study and professor at the Rady School of Management. “It also gives universities a place to start – by asking what fields with smaller gaps may be doing differently.”
Paper: “ Gender pay gaps in the social sciences. ”
Study authors: Ayelet Gneezy, Uri Gneezy and Marta Serra-Garcia, Rady School of Management; Joshua Graff Zivin, Gaurav Khanna and Elizabeth Lyons, School of Global Policy and Strategy. Graff Zivin is also affiliated with UC San Diego’s Department of Economics.
Funding: supported in part by the Cowhey Center for Global Transformation (CCGT) at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Data/statistical analysis
People
Gender pay gaps in the social sciences
20-Jul-2026