The rate for the job

Lecturers' leaders will today renew their campaign against the university gender pay gap and ask the government to provide £81m to close it. Figures produced for the lecturers' union Natfhe show that women academics fall further behind male colleagues the longer they stay in their jobs. While there is only a 3% gap between men and women aged 21-30, this jumps to 8% for staff in their 30s, 13% in their 40s and 14% for 51- to 60-year-olds. Among professors, a similar pattern emerges with a 4% pay gap for those aged 31-40 rising to 7% (£4,000) for those in their 40s.

Together with the Association of University Teachers, the union will announce the figures at the Labour party conference today, at a fringe meeting due to be attended by Margaret Hodge, the minister responsible for higher education.

Tom Wilson, Natfhe higher education secretary, said the figures showed in detail how and why pay discrimination occurred. "Universities cannot use the excuse that outside labour market pressures force them to pay men more. This new data shows discrimination is overwhelmingly an internal problem caused by universities themselves. The longer women work in higher education, the worse it gets. Women have much less chance of promotion to senior lecturer or professor, and once there, they face much lower salaries than their male colleagues."

He called on the government to provide the extra money to close the pay gap - the figure was relatively low because the numbers of senior women in universities was low - and ensure that the money was used by vice-chancellors for that purpose.

National pay scales helped to reduce discrimination, said Wilson. "The more local discretion universities have, the more discrimination creeps in. Vice-chancellors have known of this problem for years. Union, government and funding councils have urged action." He said universities had to set up transparent pay scales and radically overhaul promotion procedures to eliminate bias against women.

Natalie Fenton, AUT president, said the present pay system was discriminatory. "It is not transparent and operates on a grace and favour basis." When it came to promotion, women suffered from macho management practices.

Lorna Chessum, a Natfhe member who successfully challenged De Montfort University over her pay, believes the present case-by-case battles will never solve the problem and the government should take action. It took her three years to force the university to admit it was discriminating against her and offer £10,000 compensation; she says one of the obstacles was to persuade her own union to fight the case.

Dr Chessum discovered that a male colleague who had been appointed at the same time to a similar job in the university's education department was being paid £6,000 more pro rata, despite her qualifications being equal and her experience longer. (Fortunately for her, the colleague was a friend who shared information with her, without which she could not have mounted a case.) She felt she had been fobbed off by her head of department and the university when she raised the issue and eventually decided to go to a tribunal, with the backing of the Equal Opportunities Commission and her union.

Her research interest is inequity in education but she never dreamed she would find herself making an equal opportunities claim. "It was extremely stressful and went on for three years, but I never once flinched in my professional commitment to the job," she said. There was a happy ending for her, as she was promoted to principal lecturer immediately after winning her case.

Diana Warwick, chief executive of Universities UK, which represents university heads, said vice-chancellors were determined to tackle equal pay issues and were pressing government for more funds to modernise pay structures. "We are also working with all the higher education trade unions within the new Equality Challenge in Higher Education framework."