Gender Pay Gap in Academia. The Case of an Italian University

Despite persistent progress in gender equality, the gender wage gap remains a salient feature of academic labour markets. While existing indicators for Research Performing Organizations routinely capture horizontal and vertical gender segregation, they rarely address gender pay gaps and their decomposition into differences in characteristics and returns, largely due to data and methodological constraints. To fill this gap, this work aims to verify the existence and size of the gender pay gap in the academic context and to measure its components. To this end, administrative personal and earnings data in 2019 and in 2023 of a large public university in Northern Italy were analysed by means of OLS regression and Oaxaca-Blinder (1973) wage decomposition analyses. As a result, the gender wage gap was found to have decreased over the course of four years, from 14.5% in 2019 to 12.8% in 2023. However, investigating the differential decomposition, one can observe a sharp change in the weight of the different components contributing to it, as while in 2019 the endowments (i.e., the explained component of the decomposition) accounted for 83%—with the academic rank and having additional emoluments being relevant in explaining the gap—and the unexplained component (reflecting the difference in the returns to characteristics between the male and female individuals) accounted for the remaining 17% of the differential, in 2023 the unexplained part of the differential increased to 45% while the explained one dropped to 55%, with a larger weight in the unexplained part to be found in increased inequalities within medical departments.