The jaw-dropping salary of the Harvard professor Francesca Gino fired for data manipulation

Francesca Gino, a former professor at Harvard Business School, was once among the university's most highly compensated employees—earning an eye-popping $1 million per year. Between 2018 and 2019, she was the fifth-highest-paid employee at Harvard, drawing a six-figure salary that placed her well above many academic peers.

But Gino’s high-profile career—and high salary—came crashing down when Harvard fired her following a damning investigation into alleged research misconduct.

A Million-Dollar Scandal

Gino, a behavioral scientist known for her work on ethics, dishonesty, and human behavior, was placed on unpaid leave and ultimately fired after Harvard concluded that she had manipulated data in at least four published studies between 2012 and 2020.

The university also stripped her of tenure—making her the first Harvard professor to lose tenure since the 1940s.

The controversy began in October 2021, when questions were raised about a study she co-authored. The research claimed that having people sign an honesty pledge at the beginning of a form, rather than at the end, significantly increased truthful responses. That study was retracted in 2021 after suspicions of data fabrication emerged.

Soon after, the blog Data Colada, run by three behavioral scientists, published a series of posts alleging data fraud in four of Gino's co-authored papers. The claims triggered a full-scale investigation by Harvard throughout 2022 and 2023.

No Margin for Error

Investigators reviewed her raw data, emails, and research manuscripts and even brought in an outside forensic firm for further analysis. They concluded that Gino had intentionally altered data to ensure the findings supported her hypotheses. Her explanations—citing possible mistakes by research assistants or malicious tampering—were rejected by investigators.

Despite Gino’s public denial of the allegations—stating on her website, “I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result”—Harvard moved forward with termination proceedings.

She later filed a $25 million defamation lawsuit against Harvard, HBS Dean Srikant Datar, and the Data Colada bloggers. But in September, a federal judge in Boston dismissed the claims, ruling that as a public figure, Gino’s academic work was subject to public scrutiny under the First Amendment.