The Thursday, January 23, 2020 edition of the Marquette Mining Journal had a front-page article about a gender discrimination lawsuit filed by four female faculty members in the College of Business against NMU. The suit alleges they received lower salaries because of their gender. 

The Mining Journal article cited a statement from NMU’s administration indicating that NMU-AAUP President Brent Graves conducted a review of faculty pay structures on campus “and stated unequivocally that there is no gender bias.” The NMU-AAUP would like to point out that this analysis of salary data never made such sweeping claims. The data simply showed that when considering salaries of all full-time faculty at NMU, gender was not found to be a statistically significant variable affecting salary when conducting an analysis of covariance with an alpha of (p < 0.05). The variables of discipline, highest degree, rank, and years in rank were found to have statistically significant effects on salary. 

The report (which was distributed to all AAUP faculty and the Provost) ended with the following statement. “It should be emphasized that this analysis considered patterns across all full-time AAUP faculty. This would not preclude unique circumstances of individuals that contribute to variation in the data.” The president’s report did not state unequivocally that there is no gender bias, only that there is no pattern of gender bias across all full-time faculty. 

The NMU-AAUP has never been asked to be involved in this matter. The job of the union is to negotiate and enforce our contract. We have no indication that there has been any contract violation with regard to application of salary requirements. We wish our colleagues in the College of Business a fair and objective review of their discrimination claims in a court of law.