In a move that is meant to start making up for years of inequality and to make sure the system does not run afoul of anti-discrimination laws, nearly half of the female faculty members in the University of Maine System are getting pay raises this month to bring them in line with male faculty members.

Out of the roughly 450 female faculty members in the seven-campus system, 199 are to receive pay increases of $2,000 a year on average starting with July’s paycheck. Women make up about 36 percent of the system’s faculty.

Also, 108 of the 199, those hired in 1988 or earlier, are to divide a lump sum of $130,000 to atone for retirement packages that are smaller than they ought to be.

The increases are part of an agreement worked on and negotiated during the past two years between system officials and representatives of the Associated Faculties of the University of Maine System.

“Many of the female faculty around the system were paid at a rate clearly below their male counterparts,” James Horan, a public administration professor at the University of Maine and the union’s president, said Monday.

The salary increase, plus the lump-sum payment, are major first steps in redressing the pay imbalance, Horan added. “You can’t correct a long-term wrong with one stroke of the brush.”

On the UMS side, “we were concerned that some female faculty members had the impression that salaries were inequitable,” said Tracy Bigney, executive director of human resources for the university system. “Our guiding philosophy was: let’s see what’s happening and do the right thing. We want to be sure we are not discriminating.”

But not everyone is pleased.

Michael Montgomery, an associate professor of economics at UMaine, said the study underlying the pay raises should have looked beyond underpaid female faculty and ought to have looked at all underpaid faculty members.

“Why is sex the defining characteristic?” Montgomery asked. “What about the talented men due for raises? Why are they being ignored?”

It is inappropriate for the university system to look exclusively at any single characteristic such as class, race or sex in determining salary adjustments, he said.

The problem is that the university system lacks a merit pay mechanism, according to Montgomery. “If we had a merit pay system, many of these women would not be underpaid. … I think this is a poor and inadequate substitute for a merit-based system.”

In contrast, Michael Grillo, an associate professor of art history and former president of the Faculty Senate at UMaine, told the Bangor Daily News on Friday: “It makes reparations for the inequity of the past decades.”

To find out whether there was a bias against women when it came to pay, a joint committee of union members and system officials was established in 1999. The panel studied salaries across the system with the aid of a national expert, Dr. Lois Haignere, author of “Paychecks, a Guide to Achieving Salary Equity in Higher Education.”

After taking into consideration factors legitimately tied to salaries, such as longevity and academic attainment, the committee stated that a 2 percent or greater difference between male and female salaries was “evidence of systemic gender inequity.”

Then the committee looked at salaries within the individual campuses or within individual colleges at UMaine and the University of Southern Maine.

It found that salary differences were less than 2 percent at UM-Farmington, UM-Machias, UM-Presque Isle, in UMaine’s College of Education, and USM’s colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Public Policy and Nursing.

It did find salary differences exceeded the 2 percent standard at all other UM colleges except Engineering, as well as the College of Education at USM, and for all programs except nursing at UM-Fort Kent.

The study showed that when factors such as years served and post-graduate degrees held by a faculty member were ignored, the average difference in the salaries of male and female faculty members ranged from $472 at UM-Fort Kent to more than $10,500 at UMaine.

However, when pertinent factors were taken into consideration, the differences were substantially less, ranging from UM-Presque Isle where female faculty members earned on average $126 more than their male counterparts to UM-Augusta where male salaries outpaced female salaries by $3,079.

At the UMaine College of Education, female faculty salaries were only $173 less than male salaries, the narrowest gap in Orono, while at USM’s College of Education, women earned $2,000 less than men, the largest difference at USM.

The committee came to no conclusion about the UMaine College of Engineering because it only has five female faculty members. The panel recommended that UMaine “undertake a careful case-by-case review of individual salaries to determine whether adjustments are needed.”

Margaret Patterson, an associate professor of math at UM-Augusta, who has been with the system for 20 years, was a member of the gender-equity committee.

Patterson, who is one of the 108 getting both a salary increase and a portion of the lump sum, said, “I don’t think you can ever really go back, but I’m pleased with the way things came out.”

Salary equity is still evolving, she added.