Discrimination in science: Salaries of foreign and U.S. born land‐grant university scientists

The dominance of the US innovation and academic system relies heavily on foreign‐born labor for its success. Recent literature has shown evidence of wage gaps in academia based on gender and race; however, little is known about whether a wage gap might exist for foreign‐born faculty. This paper studies the compensation gap between US‐ and foreign‐born agricultural and life science faculty at 52 US land‐grant universities (LGU) using a survey of over 1400 scientists conducted in 2005 and 2015. We develop a framework to categorize the sources of a potential compensation gap into testable categories that capture direct discrimination as well as indirect (systemic) discrimination. We find wage differences in total annual compensation among the foreign‐born and the US‐born, tenure‐track faculty, however, the gap in the base annual salary is insignificant. This suggests that additional salary components like grants and summer teachings may not be equally available to foreign‐born faculty even though, on average, foreign‐born scientists work are more productive than US‐born scientists on most common output metrics. The decomposition analysis suggests that about one‐half of the gap (at 10% level) in the base salary and 60% of the differences in total salary (at 5% level)is due to various types of direct or systemic discrimination. Using our framework, we then rule in and rule out some important types of systemic discrimination.