"The difference between the average salary of male tenured faculty and that of female tenured faculty derives from the fact that our women faculty are younger than our men on average,"said Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jeremy R. Knowles.

Bell said that women faculty are paid eight to 10 percent less than male faculty on average. What troubles her is that this gap has remained constant over time.

A preponderance of women professors who have relatively less seniority and work in lower paid disciplines is often considered the cause of this inequality, Bell said. But with women now moving into all the disiplines and increasing in seniority, the discrepancy should narrow.

Besides overall salary levels, the report also contained data on salary increases of "continuing faculty," payraises for those who maintained their same academic rank--another area where Harvard faculty fared well.

Tenured professors across the University received an average increase in compensation of 5.7 percent and associate professors received 6.6 percent pay increase, according to the report.

"Within the FAS, I have been concerned always to ensure that the average faculty salary rise was higher than inflation, and despite serious deficits in the early 1990s we've always achieved that," Knowles said