Baby, watch your back

Did you know you could search online your and your colleagues' salaries if you work at a state-funded institution? Me neither. Not until recently.

I noticed something when I searched for my salary and the salary of the other postdoc in my lab. We finished our PhDs within two months of each other, and I joined the lab roughly a month after he started. I come from Psychology, he from Physiology. We both wanted to join a lab that was out of our comfort zone, so we converged on adult hippocampal neurogenesis as our focus. He's an awesome person and I have mad respect for him as a person and a scientist.

And his yearly salary is $1,000 more than mine.

I'm curious why this is the case, as the most obvious difference between us is our genders. I haven't come up with another convincing factor in this discrepancy.

Baby, watch your back. I'll be watching mine much more closely in the future.

*Edited: The title is actually a reference to Nellie McKay's song "Baby Watch Your Back" but it's not on Youtube and here's another one of her amazing songs.