Female principal investigators are being routinely appointed at lower pay grades than men taking up identical posts at UK universities, leading to a significant salary deficit, a new study suggests.

Drawing on a survey of 365 new research group leaders in the UK, of whom roughly 40 per cent were women, researchers found that ¡°the majority of principal investigators were being paid less than their male counterparts¡±, according to a preprint recently published on?.

That pay gap corresponded to a ¡°?3,000 to ?5,000 annual difference¡±, with a far larger proportion of female researchers falling into the ?30,000 to ?35,000 pay bracket than males, says the paper, titled ¡°The Life of PI: Transitions to Independence in Academia¡±, which claims to have profiled a ¡°significant proportion of new group leaders in the UK recruited over the past six years¡±.

The gender pay gap, which ¡°cannot be explained by seniority¡±, was driven by the fact that female respondents are ¡°more likely to be appointed at the lower of two possible grades¡± ¨C either grade 7 versus grade 8 for lecturer positions, or grade 8 versus grade 9 for senior lecturer posts ¨C than men, report the study¡¯s authors, Sophie Acton, Andrew Bell, Christopher Toseland and Alison Twelvetrees.

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That was crucial because ¡°while it makes little difference to actual salary initially, it has huge implications for future career progression¡±, the paper states.

Dr Acton, a research group leader at the Medical Research Council¡¯s Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at UCL, said she was ¡°surprised¡± by the survey¡¯s results, which also covered areas around time spent teaching, job satisfaction and research funding.

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¡°I genuinely thought the pay gap in academia was a seniority issue caused by having top-level jobs dominated by men and it would even itself out over time,¡± Dr Acton told?Times Higher Education.

¡°But if we¡¯re seeing this gap appear for relatively junior positions then that is disappointing,¡± she continued, adding it may be difficult to address such disparities because ¡°employers will not want to move away from flexible and negotiated salaries [for principal investigators].¡±

The research, which found that principal investigators generally completed a seven-year postdoctoral period across two to three fixed-term positions before leading their own group, also suggests that women won ¡°significantly lower¡± additional funding in overall value as principal investigators.

Thus, women¡¯s careers are ¡°more likely to stall [because they were] failing to gain momentum with funding and therefore recruitment [to permanent positions]¡±, says the report, which argues that female principal investigators should be ¡°encouraged and supported to apply for more funding and build their teams in the same way as male new PIs¡± to combat what it calls a ¡°worrying trend¡±.

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The paper also highlights how roughly three times as many men were recruited as principal investigators than women in 2013, which it describes as a ¡°worrying statistic on gender disparity in recruitment [related to] the research?excellence framework 2014¡±.

The ¡°wave of recruitment [prior to the 2014 REF deadline] significantly, if not entirely, favoured male applicants¡±, it says, adding that this may have been driven by an ¡°increase in direct head-hunting or more informal recruitment techniques driven by networks¡±,?and that the ¡°unacceptable¡± trend ¡°warrants further investigation to understand why the disparity is so extreme¡±.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com