Determining Salary Equity: Policies, Procedures, and Problems.
In recent years much attention has been focused on the equity of salary policies within higher education. The legal impetus for eliminating sex discrimination began with the Equal Pay Act (1963), followed by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which as amended in 1972, specifically included educational institutions and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce the act. Most recently, regulations of Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 specify that "employers must provide either equal contributions to or equal benefits under pension plans for male and female employees."' Today the legal and moral need to end discrimination is not the issue: rather the issue is the procedure or method that most fairly determines equitable compensation of any faculty member regardless of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. There is considerable evidence that the salaries of female faculty are lower than those of comparable male faculty. Studies conducted at individual universities [2, 5, 10, 12, 15, 18, 29] and national surveys [1, 10, 14, 24] have generally shown that women have been earning lower salaries than comparable men. A number of different methods or procedures have been used on individual campuses to determine possible salary inequities, but most repre-