There will always be disagreements about what counts as a fair level of remuneration for each particular role in higher education and wider society. But one principle agreed on by most is that of equal pay for equal work. And that principle surely applies across job roles just as much as it does across genders and races.

In that regard, a quiet but deep injustice is unfolding across Australian universities – although it is not uniquely Australian.

An ever-growing class of highly skilled specialists designs experiments, develops novel analytical methods, builds bespoke instrumentation and protocols, trains postgraduate students and generates unique intellectual property that underpins a significant portion of research programmes. Some hold doctorates; others bring decades of engineering, technical or industry expertise that no academic pathway replicates.

However, prevailing systems and academic culture treat these essential specialists as interchangeable, disposable support staff, rather than as the critical workers they are, with expertise to be cultivated and retained. That is because the terms governing their employment, recognition and career progression continue, in most cases, to be separate from those relating to academic colleagues, whose work they often mirror.

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The UK and US have led the way by redesigning career pathways for these specialists. Some institutions in Australia have taken important steps, too – but most are still pondering what to do, even though the tools to accelerate the transformation already exist within the system.

This has negative consequences for specialists’ professional recognition and career mobility, and it is salary where the mismatch is most measurable. But with multiple Australian universities currently negotiating with unions their next enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs), which stipulate pay and conditions, salary is also where the opportunity for reform is most concrete.

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One recent job advert for a research-platform leadership role at an Australian university, typical of the genre, demands a PhD with five-plus years of postdoctoral or industry experience. Successful candidates will be expected to coordinate high-throughput analytical workflows, train postgraduate students and contribute to peer-reviewed publications.

This is research leadership. But the successful candidate will typically be classified as a higher education worker (HEW) – a member of professional staff – at level 8, entailing a base salary of only A$115,000 (£60,000)–A$130,000. An academic at the same institution, under the same EBA, has access to a structured promotion pathway to professor – the base salary for which, across Australian universities, sits at about A$215,000 (£115,000). The infrastructure specialist has no equivalent pathway.

The 2025 Australasian Cytometry Society workforce survey illustrates this gap. Among PhD-holding flow cytometry specialists at Australian universities and academic-associated research institutes, 85 per cent of respondents were employed in the general/professional staff stream rather than the academic stream, and 77 per cent reported full-time-equivalent salaries of A$120,000 or less – below the typical academic lecturer (level B) base – despite most having also completed a postdoctoral fellowship and accumulated seven or more years of specialist experience.

Advertised platform leadership roles across multiple Australian universities confirm the ceiling: HEW level 9 tops out at about A$135,000–A$145,000. And compounding the structural gap, uniform percentage salary increases negotiated during enterprise bargaining widen the absolute disparity with every round. A 3.5 per cent rise on a professor’s base of around A$220,000 delivers an extra A$7,700; the same percentage on A$120,000 delivers A$4,200. So the gap grows by more than A$3,500 in a single year and accelerates across successive agreements.

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Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

Although it is structurally baked in, the gap is not a deliberate attempt to shortchange infrastructure specialists. Rather, it is the product of a classification framework developed in an era when professional staff in universities were largely in administrative or technical-support categories.

Those roles are well captured by the existing descriptors. But research infrastructure specialisms are very different. Their practitioners design experiments, develop novel methods, contribute to publications, supervise postgraduates, and provide strategic research leadership across multiple groups. None of these tasks maps neatly on to a system whose descriptors – which drive professional progression – emphasise the scope of duties, complexity of administrative oversight, and breadth of organisational responsibility.

Position descriptions written within this framework therefore struggle to capture research contribution as a primary duty. And the classification process – applied conscientiously – stipulates a salary level that reflects only what the framework can see. The further a role drifts from the administrative-support model, the worse the fit becomes between its framework description and the reality of what the role actually involves.

A second structural feature compounds the problem. Because these roles sit within the professional-staff stream, they share its underlying assumption that the role – rather than the individual – defines the salary level. For administrative roles, this may work effectively. For specialist research roles built through doctoral training or equivalent industry experience, it does not: the expertise is accumulated through domain-specific problem-solving that no generic role description can fully capture.

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The salary disparity affects all research infrastructure specialists, but for doctoral holders it carries an additional layer of policy incoherence. Australian universities are financially rewarded for every PhD they produce: in 2026, the Commonwealth will provide A$2.37 billion in research block grant funding, allocated through the Research Training Program (RTP) and the Research Support Programme (RSP). Allocations are driven by research income and, for the RTP, completions of higher degrees by research. Yet the national Fair Work Award governing professional staff – which sets out the minimum wages and conditions they are entitled to – determines job classifications based on duties in the position description, not on credentials held. So while a PhD generates Commonwealth funding for the institution that confers it, it generates no salary floor for the person who earns it even if they remain within universities – unless they secure an academic appointment.

A PhD matters not because it is a paper credential but because of what it represents in practice. Doctoral or equivalent research experience equips infrastructure specialists to navigate multiple scientific domains in a single working week – translating between methodologies and bringing rigour to study designs they did not author. It is precisely this cross-disciplinary capacity that funding bodies have invested in, and the research workforce relies on it. And yet universities continue to fail to reward it fairly.

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Mark Kolbe/Getty Images

Worst of all, nothing in the enterprise agreement requires this injustice. Universities already have the administrative tools to address it, such as reclassification of existing roles, creation of specialist position families, or the extension of conjoint academic titles. That this has not happened more widely, despite a decade of explicit recommendations from sector reports and policy roadmaps, reflects the inertia imposed by relying on a single framework to classify an increasingly diverse workforce.

The issue of titles is particularly revealing. Universities have a generous tradition of conferring adjunct professor and honorary fellow titles on external industry collaborators – including those without doctoral qualifications – to recognise expertise and facilitate research partnerships. And many Australian universities, including the Australian National University, UNSW Sydney and Curtin University, have professor of practice pathways: salaried academic appointments designed for people whose expertise comes through professional practice rather than traditional academic metrics. These pathways describe the work that research infrastructure specialists already do, yet they are not offered to them.

What does require systemic reform is the salary architecture. EBAs should have PhD-equivalent salary floors for research infrastructure specialists as a headline bargaining objective. The correct solution is a purpose-built “research infrastructure specialist” classification stream – with descriptors based on research enablement, training, technical leadership and service contribution, rather than the size of budgets and teams managed. The University of Liverpool launched exactly this in 2023, while Princeton University has developed a competency-based career ladder for research software engineers.

Most importantly, Commonwealth funding conditions should link doctoral completion weightings to minimum remuneration standards for all involved in facilitating those completions, whether they are on academic contracts or not. Equity conditions are already attached to Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants. As funders increasingly link research investment to workforce conditions, institutions that act early will be best positioned for the next funding cycle.

None of these reforms is sufficient in isolation, however. The sequencing matters: a national classification benchmark enables the funding condition, which creates the institutional incentive – to which enterprise agreement reforms then give structural form.

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Dorling Kindersley Ltd/Alamy

Things are already happening. The Commonwealth’s acknowledged the problem, and 22 project directors of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) proposed a framework. In 2024, the Academy for Collaborative Research Infrastructure was independently established. The 2025 report – drawing on the largest-ever survey of UK technical staff in higher education – calls on funders and employers to “recognise the blurring of boundaries between technical and academic roles” and to ensure mechanisms for movement between career pathways. The – adopted by the University of Sydney and Monash University, as well as over 110 UK institutions – offers a framework for accountability. But commitment without job classification reform is a statement of values, not a change in conditions.

The recent launch of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission and the publication of the Commonwealth’s strategic review of research, , offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put this right. What is needed, first and foremost, is the institutional courage to extend the pathways to recognition that already exist to the specialists who make Australian research infrastructure work.

The universities that take the lead will not only retain expertise that is difficult to replace. They will also find it easier to recruit staff in a sector where workforce reform is becoming a competitive marker. And they will set the standard for a sector ready but still not always willing to act.

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is chair of the Technician Commitment Task Force at the Australasian Cytometry Society and lead technical specialist for the flow cytometry platform at the Curtin Medical Research Institute, Curtin University. is founder and executive director of the Academy for Collaborative Research Infrastructure, an adjunct professor at the University of Queensland and an industry fellow at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).