The Provost’s Office recently completed an equity raise process and provided the following summary information to Faculty Senate. Please note that for this process, salary comparisons were based on position, rank, and department, under the principle that people with the same job should be compensated similarly. In most cases, faculty were initially identified as candidates for raises if their salary was below one standard deviation from the mean for their unit. In some case, individual considerations were used when the standard deviation criteria could not be applied (e.g., units with a small number of positions). Chairs and directors were eligible, but no higher administrators (e.g., assistant deans) received equity raises.
Please note that this was a first step in addressing salary equity concerns at WSU, and the process will be incremental. It was clear from this review, for instance, that salary compression remains a significant challenge, and other important variables, including campus costs of living, promotion support, and differences between disciplines, should be considered in the future.
The total amount of money available for this inaugural equity raise process was $1,000,000. As a point of reference, WSU would need a budget of $6,394,925 to bring all faculty salaries up to their unit means. Aggregate statistics are provided below. Small sample sizes and commensurate privacy concerns limit the resolution of the summary statistics.
Out of 1,513 career- and tenure-track faculty eligible for consideration, 244 were identified for equity raises with salary increases ranging from $1,000 to $18,000. For faculty who identified as male or female, women received an average raise of $4,333 (avg. 6.03% increase) and men received an average raise of $3,872 (avg. 4.62% increase). The current WSU reporting system does not include options for non-binary reporting.
Out of 244 equity raises, 45.5% were awarded to career-track faculty (clinical, director, extension, librarian, research, scholarly, and teaching), and 54.5% were awarded to tenure-track faculty (assistant, associate, professor).
Out of 11 reporting units, the largest numbers of faculty receiving equity salary increases have appointments in CAS (n=96), VCEA (n=37), CAHNRS (n=27), and CVM (n=18). Salary increases were distributed across at all five campuses (180 in Pullman, 35 in Vancouver, 18 in Spokane, 8 
in Tri-Cities, and 3 in Everett). The College of Nursing was not included in this process because a different source of funding was used to address salary shortfalls.
Doug Call
Faculty Senate Past Chair
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