If you liked Veronica’s excellent Science Grrl post on the gender wage gap, make sure you read Inside Higher Ed’s article , “Hiring Women as Full Professors.” Per IHE‘s Scott Jaschik, University of Texas/Austin released a self study on gender equity last fall, and, by gosh, they used the data to shape their subsequent hiring this spring, and hired more women than they ever have in the past.

The UT report showed gender gaps across the board–hiring, salary, retention, time to promotion and tenure–but the biggest gap was among full professors: After controlling for a lot of stuff, they found that among full professors, men’s starting salaries were on average $12, 229 higher than women’s. Moreover, only 19% of full profs were women. (Sounds like a case of “this food’s so bad and there’s not enough of it!”) The typical response to the wider gap at the top–seen across the country and across professions–has been, jeepers ya’ll this is a problem, but I guess we’ll just have to wait. This takes time!

But UT said, uh, why wait? As Jaschik reports:

“Randy Diehl, dean of liberal arts, said it was important for universities not to simply wait for junior professors to rise through the ranks. He said that the presence of women in the senior ranks is part of what you need to encourage younger women, and that there are issues of bias if an institution doesn’t add women as full professors. Diehl noted, for example, that the highest salaries for full professors go to those who didn’t come up through the ranks, but who were recruited from one institution to another. Universities that rely on gradual promotion from within will not see a narrowing of average faculty salaries between men and women, he said.”

Read the article. Their hires look fantastic. And the dean’s logic: Goes for minority hiring and promotion too, right? (Thanks to Paul Rutter for the heads up!)

-Virginia Rutter