Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Library Journal article on starting salaries and gender differences

This seemed appropriate to our discussion in class yesterday. According to this article in the Library Journal,

While it took almost ten years since the last significant salary breakthrough in 1997, starting salaries for American Library Association (ALA)-accredited master's degree graduates breached the $40,000 barrier. In 2005, the average annual starting salary for new LIS grads was $40,118. Additionally, it was a stellar year for minority graduates, with average starting salaries increasing a full 6%, to $42,333.

[...]

Job assignment had significant impact on salaries in 2005. Positions in database management, for solo librarians, and in usability testing helped drive the rise in overall average earnings. These increases leveled some of the downward turns of other positions, including those in technical services and government documents.

Yet there is a significant gender gap within these figures:

Women still eclipse the LIS professions, comprising 85% of the graduate pool reporting employment status. In 2005, the gender gap persisted and even widened. Average starting salaries for women have yet to reach $40,000. They reported an average of $39,587 for 2005 (2.28% increase—less than $1000—from 2004), and this increase was significantly less than that experienced by their male counterparts. Men garnered an average starting salary of $42,143 (a 4.49% increase from 2004), which is 6.46% higher than women’s starting salaries.

The original article is chock full of other useful stats.

1 Comments:

At 8:18 AM, Blogger bbromley said...

These statistics are so frustrating. What are the reasons behind female librarians getting fewer leadership and director positions, and thus making less money? I wonder if it's old-fashioned sexism, or could there be something new here?

 

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