Are male professors better paid than female professors?

A small article in the Ottawa Citizen has the following headline: "Male professors better paid than female colleagues."

Male University professors earn on average up to $17,575 more than their female colleagues at Canadian Universities, Statistics Canada reported yesterday.

Well, I was intrigued. I got a copy of the Stats Canada report and found something completely different.

There is data on a variety of Universities, with most of the data parsed by the different type of Professor: Full, Associate, and Assistant, and lower ranks if applicable. The male/female data is just lumped together -- so, you don't know if the differential pay for males was due to differentials in rank.

I don't know who is rushing to judgement here - the Ottawa Citizen or Stats Canada...but you would expect more from Stats Canada. They clearly have the data to nornalize male/female earnings by rank, but they chose not to. And the Citizen chose not to question either.