New data on Imperial professors’ salaries reveals gender and faculty differences
A recent Freedom of Information request has revealed the highest professorial salaries endowed by Imperial are mostly attributed to males and Business School professors.
Beyond the outsized numbers of male professors, gender discrepancies in earnings stood out. While the salary distribution for professors of both genders is comparable for pay bands inferior to £200,000, this does not hold true for the highest earners. All staff members paid more than £300,000 yearly are male. As the College anonymises data when there are less than five earners in a salary band, the gender distribution is less clear for the second-highest pay band (£250,000- £299,999).
Salary differences also occurred between faculties. In the faculties of Medicine and Natural Sciences, no staff member is paid more than £250,000, whereas between one and five professors in the Engineering department receive salaries exceeding that amount. But the department that stands out most is the Business School, with eight academics pocketing sums higher than £300,000. This is comparable to College President Hugh Brady’s salary, which stood at £375,000 (excluding other non-salary allowances) for 2024–25.
Only 55 staff on professor pay grade are employed in the Business School, compared to at least 252 in the faculty of Engineering. Elevated salaries are not unusual for university-level finance teaching staff, whose earnings tend to be inflated by the high demand for business education – the undergraduate program of the Business School is Imperial’s most selective.
The base full-time annual salary for a London-based professor – the highest academic grade – was £92,969 as of August 2024, with any further wage increases dependant on individual performance. The data indicated most professors obtained such increases, as the £100,000-£149,999 pay band is the most populated in every faculty.
This apparent prioritisation of more lucrative departments comes as academics across the country have denounced management decisions in British universities designed to increased profitability at the expense of the quality and breadth of courses on offer. In early 2024, the University of Kent eliminated six unprofitable departments in an attempt to curb financial losses. According to the Office for Students, these are responses to a souring financial climate for higher education institutions, with 43% of universities in England now in a budget deficit, compared to 35% two years ago.
