  The National Institute of Health (NIH) sets postdoctoral (postdoc) trainee
stipend levels that many American institutions and investigators use as a basis
for postdoc salaries. Although salary standards are held constant across
universities, the cost of living in those universities' cities and towns vary
widely. Across non-postdoc jobs, more expensive cities pay workers higher wages
that scale with an increased cost of living. This work investigates the extent
to which postdoc wages account for cost-of-living differences. More than 27,000
postdoc salaries across all US universities are analyzed alongside measures of
regional differences in cost of living. We find that postdoc salaries do not
account for cost-of-living differences, in contrast with the broader labor
market in the same cities and towns. Despite a modest increase in income in
high cost of living areas, real (cost of living adjusted) postdoc salaries
differ by 29% ($15k 2021 USD) between the least and most expensive areas.
Cities that produce greater numbers of tenure-track faculty relative to
students such as Boston, New York, and San Francisco are among the most
impacted by this pay disparity. The postdoc pay gap is growing and is
well-positioned to incur a greater financial burden on economically
disadvantaged groups and contribute to faculty hiring disparities in women and
racial minorities.
