It’s Not the Creatures, It’s the Academy! Gender Pay Gaps and Research Careers in Academia

Abstract

The aim of this text is to present motherhood as an argument that naturalizes the difficulties of women in their academic careers and that displaces the current criteria of scientific evaluation. Based on a study of the salary gap at the Universitat de València, we identify and confront salary situations such as the wage penalty for motherhood and the earnings bonus for fatherhood in order to try to recognize how a meritocratic institution operates. The sexennial salary supplement that recognizes salary productivity between men and women who occupy stable positions at the University are analyzed and related to the different areas of knowledge according to their competitive style is analyzed. The consequences that the COVID-19 pandemic has generated for academic women can be aggravated if we only observe as a problem the lack of conciliation without proposals for the change of evaluation that governs R+D+i.