Bethesda, Md. - June 2018: The National Institutes of Health is the nation’s medical research agency and the largest biomedical research agency in the world. Image: Mark Van Scyoc/Shutterstock.com
By: FEDweek StaffAn academic study has found gender-based differences in pay at federal agencies involved in scientific research, which it said are linked to “cultural gender frames of the agencies’ field of research.”
The study, led by a University of Massachusetts Amherst sociologist and published in the American Journal of Sociology, said that agencies concerned primarily with traditionally male-dominated physical sciences and engineering, “more of the pay gap can be attributed to inequalities within jobs, or “within-job discrimination,” so that men are paid more than women in the exact same jobs at the same agency locations, even women at the same pay grade and with the same work experience,” according to a summary.
“In the agencies based on more gender-neutral sciences, such as life sciences and interdisciplinary agencies, they found that more of the pay gap can be attributed to differences in individual characteristics, so that men and women of different educational and racial backgrounds are hired into different jobs in the agency in a way that reinforces gender hierarchies, but does not produce much within-job discrimination,” it adds.
The study also found “differences in how agencies sort workers by their individual characteristics,” which the summary said varies significantly among agencies.
Researchers looked at federal employment data from 1994-2008 for the study, focusing on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Energy (DOE).
