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AFP Salary Survey 2008: The gender wage gap...closes!
By Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf
September 8, 2008Earlier this year, the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) released its annual compensation and benefits survey. According to the document, which was directed by Dr. Cathlene Williams, AFP’s vice president of research in Arlington, VA., the organization’s 2008 Compensation and Benefits Study U.S. and Canada received responses from more than 3,500 AFP members across North America (465 from Canada) to help fuel the findings.
It’s a comprehensive paper, containing 134 pages of statistical breakdowns on compensation from junior to senior employees and analyses of compensation in the categories of health, retirement and various demographics. Of the latter, one subcategory has stood out over the years, the discrepancy between male and female salaries.
- Unconscious bias by supervisors
- Women less aggressive negotiators than men
- Societal double standard
- Women more hesitant to point wage imbalance
- Personal decisions impact salary negatively
She got, he got
Based on some of the latest figures from Statistics Canada (StatsCan), specifically a 2006 document called Women in Canada: A Gender-based Statistical Report, findings showed that as of 2003, women earned less than men on average. Anecdotally, this is unsurprising.According to the authors of the chapter on women’s wages, Colin Lindsay and Marcia Almey, in 2003 “the average annual pre-tax income of women aged 16 and over from all sources, including employment earnings, government transfer payments, investment income, and other money income, was $24,400. This was just 62% the figure for men, who had an average income of $39,300 that year.”
The AFP survey revealed a huge wage discrepancy between male and female fundraising workers...in the U.S. The report states, “There is a dramatic difference in the compensation of males and females. The average salary of male fundraisers is reported to be $88,071. Females are paid an average of $66,646.”
While the AFP survey looked strictly at fundraising professionals for their stats, Williams notes that, according to her findings, in Canada the wage gap appears to be shrinking.
“We've observed approximately a $10,000 difference in male and female salaries every year since we started doing the salary survey in 2001,” she says. “This year, for the first time, the gap was significantly reduced in Canada. I can only speculate that the competition for experienced fundraisers in Canada is so great that women have been able to successfully negotiate higher salaries than in the past.”
In fact, in Canada the gap closes significantly, with men averaging $76,980 and women at $73,627. It’s a seemingly good indicator that the wage gap has diminished since the StatsCan report a few years back.
The 2008 AFP report accounts for some of the overall wage discrepancies with the following findings:
- Years of professional experience correlated with salaries. Those with less than 10 years of experience reported average salaries ranging from $52,936 to $64,000. The highest salaries were reported in the 30 or more years of experience range, with an average of $121,571.
- Within the three regions of Canada, average salaries for all respondents ranged from $51,807 in the eastern provinces to $79,245 in the central provinces.
- Fundraisers in organizations that were national in scope reported average salaries of $78,292, followed by international organizations with an average of $77,049. Organizations with a provincial or regional scope reported the lowest average salaries at $72,492.
- There was a positive correlation between average compensation and size of an organization’s budget, staff, and funds raised.
- There was no correlation between average compensation and level of education.
- The possession of a certification credential correlates positively with salary. CFREs reported average salaries $14,000 higher than the average for non-certified respondents.
Why the difference
Williams also provided CharityVillage with supplemental information on the gender-wage gaps based on her writings in 2006 from that year’s AFP report.
“Over the years we've tried asking questions about why respondents feel the gender salary gap exists. In the 2006 survey, we asked several questions about the possibility of gender bias in salary decisions,” Williams said. “We found that significantly more women than men felt they had experienced gender bias in salaries, and that more women than men feel there is widespread salary gender bias in the fundraising profession. Top reasons cited by the respondents included the ‘double standard’ in society and the unconscious bias of supervisors. Other high-ranking reasons included that fact that women employees have been hesitant to complain about salary bias, and male employees tend to be more aggressive in pursuing salary raises.”
That said, Williams acknowledges in her follow-up article to the 2008 survey, It’s Your Money: Highlights of the 2008 Salary Survey, that in Canada an almost equal percentage of male and female fundraising professionals felt they had “negotiated effectively” for their salaries. At the same time, 34% of Canadian women respondents indicated they felt that certain personal decisions (i.e. taking time off to raise children or to relocate due to a spouse’s job shift) had negatively affected their earnings. Only 24.8% of men had the same response. “Respondents also mentioned career changes, age, being female, financial problems in the employing organization, depressed regional economy, being ‘openly gay’...and health issues as contributing to lower earnings,” Williams writes.
Fighting the good fight
While the AFP report only looks at a small cross section of Canadian workers in the voluntary sector, the results show a leveling out of the salary playing field across genders, and bode well for eventually righting a decades-old, unjust imbalance.As of January 2008, the AFP reports that 67% of its nearly 30,000 person membership is comprised of women.
Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf is president of WordLaunch professional writing services in Toronto. He can be reached at andy@wordlaunch.com.
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