Women Still Paid Less

In a year in which Harvard's president questioned the abilities of women to do science, The Scientist's salary survey shows that women are coming up short in terms of compensation. The disparity between male and female median salaries grew $200 since 2004, and now stands at $21,700. The greatest gulf is in the highest ranks: $28,500 among department heads and up to $7,000 among professor positions. The pay gaps are much greater in industry than they are in academia – nearly $15,000 for PhD-holding senior researchers.

Part of the reason for these differences could be that "men are more likely to have been in a high rank for many, many years and have experienced the pay increases for longer than women have," says Kimberlee Shauman at the University of California, Davis, and author of Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes. But there's still a $3,000 difference between men and ...