Aren’t professors supposed to side with evidence, not politics?

Campus Reform reports.

UGA profs refuse to believe study showing no gender pay gap

Several professors at the University of Georgia are questioning the methods of an independent study because it failed to reveal a gender pay gap between male and female professors.

Last year, the university conducted its first internal gender pay gap study since 2002, according to UGA’s independent news weekly, The Red and Black. To ensure that there were no conflicts of interest, the study was managed by a third-party statistical research organization called Economic Research Services Group ( ERS Group), which collected the nine-month salary data of UGA professors to compile the results.

Dr. Sarah Covert, Associate Provost of Faculty Affairs, announced the results of the study at a University Council meeting in May, revealing that researchers “found no institution-wide practice or pattern of paying faculty members differently based on gender.”

Several professors, however, expressed concerns about how the findings were portrayed, arguing that alternative methodologies would have yielded starkly different conclusions.

Dr. Patricia Yager, professor of marine sciences and incoming chair of the University Council’s Human Resource Committee, noted that UGA’s 2002 study used three different statistical analyses to produce three distinct results: one showing negligible differences in pay, one showing a medium difference, and one showing a large difference.

The 2015 study, Yager contended, used only one method to show only the smallest difference in pay and ignored the other possible results.

She also expressed that she was “a bit stunned by the lack of scientific rigor” in the ERS Group’s methods, telling Red and Black that if a student had submitted an assignment using the same statistical methodology as ERS Group, she would have failed them.