A study released Monday by the American Association of University Professors showed salaries of Wisconsin’s public and private university professors are less than the national average.

University of Wisconsin spokesperson David Giroux said he is not surprised by the findings, adding the data from this year’s AAUP report has not uncovered any new patterns.

“It’s a longstanding problem, one that we have been working on for many years, one that the Board of Regents was working on very specifically with a multi-year plan to request from the state the funds needed to bring our average salaries in line with the midpoint of our peers,” Giroux said. “About the time we were making some headway with that, the bottom fell out of the economy.”

The Board of Regents intended to gain increased funding for professors over the next four to six years. However, the governor’s budget did not allow for such an increase, Giroux said.

John Curtis, director of the Department of Research and Public Policy for the AAUP, said higher education and faculty members are “engines for economic development.”

“Unfortunately, at the state level especially, a lot of legislators are looking at their university and college systems only as a cost, and we really emphasize that investment in higher education and especially investment in the faculty is really investing in a resource,” Curtis said.

According to Giroux, the UW System is given a set budget at the beginning of each year. Certain amounts of money are then allocated to the specific educational departments, which in turn determine the budget for each individual professor.

The salary disparity becomes most evident when the school looks to fill vacant teaching positions, Giroux said. He added these vacancies often take significantly longer to fill based on the salary discrepancies and the qualifications mandated to be hired by the university.

On several occasions, professors have left UW to accept more attractive teaching offers at other universities.

“(They) take with them significant amounts of outside grant funding, and that creates a big hole in our research operation that sometimes takes years to fill,” Giroux said.

The report also revealed a continuation of gender inequality across the nation, showing a 4-1 ratio of men to women hired as professors at doctoral universities.

UW’s faculty is currently 29.8 percent female, according to Jocelyn Milner, UW administrator at the Department of Academic Planning and Analysis. Efforts from the Women in Science and Engineering Leader Institute to balance gender equality have been a constant presence on campus.

Curtis said his department is continually working to increase gender equality in the workplace by breaking down gender stereotypes and barriers that women often face.

“We think it’s important for [women] to look to the faculty and see role models, and that means women faculty members so they can have a sense that … their opportunities are not going to be limited because they are women,” Curtis said.