Income Gap in Healthcare Exposes Gender Inequities
(Photo Credit: Sorbetto // Getty Images)
By Melissa Tejada
The healthcare field denies women proper compensation, according to multiple studies. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), and the Harvard Business Review (HRB) have all published data confirming this disparity.
A 2018 study done by Medscape found that “across the basic science disciplines, women earned 90 cents per dollar earned by men and 77 cents per dollar across clinical science disciplines.”
Sareh Parangi, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and president of the Association of Women Surgeons, stated in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons that “unequal pay for women often begins with their first job and persists for the duration of their careers.” Another study in Annals of Internal Medicine determined that the average starting salary for men was almost $17,000 higher than that for newly graduated women.
Some Lehman alums who work in healthcare in New York find the pay inequity upsetting. John Carlos Rodriguez, Lehman alum in Nutrition and a current senior in community health education at Brooklyn College, stated that these inequities are “disgusting.” As a solution, Rodriguez suggested that there “be petitions made or some kind of movement to increase pay equity.”
New York University (NYU) nursing student Mariely Olivo said income inequity is something not widely discussed but fairly known. She disclosed that “one of my male friends, who graduated from the same school as me and has the same credentials, actually makes around $800 more biweekly. Although $800 doesn’t seem like much, it’s like saying you aren’t as qualified because of your gender.”
The largest factor in the income gap is the units used by hospitals and insurers to compensate physicians for the work that they do. These relative value units (RVU) are “a standard to determine the amount to pay doctors depending on the productivity,” according to a Medical Billing Services review. “It is a number that defines the volume of work doctors perform when treating patients for all procedures and services covered under the Physician Fee Schedule.”
Parangi stated that “the perception is that women generate fewer RVUs because they’re lazy. In reality, if you look at the specialties where there are a high percentage of women, such as obstetrics and gynecology, which is 54 percent women, and compare it to urology, which is about 8 percent women, you see dramatic disparities in RVUs for analogous procedures.”
RVUs, units that are used by Medicare to determine the fee payment for doctors depending on the procedure performed, are decided by a committee that has 30 voting members, only two of which are female. A paper published in 2017 in Gynecologic Oncology showed that for gynecologic and urologic procedures 84 percent of procedures were compensated at a higher rate for male-specific procedures.
This issue exists globally. An international survey conducted by Medscape showed “primary care physicians in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Brazil, and Mexico reported similar gender pay gaps, with female doctors in those countries making 20-29 percent less than their male colleagues.”
The survey also demonstrated that “specialists reported even wider gaps in pay by gender, ranging from 19 percent in Spain and 47 percent in Germany.” As men climb the medical ranks, they are increasingly compensated for their work. However, women’s salaries do not rise to the same level, even if all factors are nearly identical.
Indeed, statistically female doctors outperform their male peers. A 2019 Medscape study demonstrates that of 1.5 million Medicare hospitalizations in the U.S., female physicians had significantly lower mortality and re-hospitalization rates than their male peers. Still, their pay is significantly lower.
“We often are not aware that there are others with the same qualifications as us that are getting paid more to do the same job.”
HBR’s solution is enhancing salary data. Regular pay audits and greater pay transparency would force institutions to prove why male physicians with the same experience and qualifications as their female colleagues deserve higher pay.
Former Lehman nursing major, Carmen Martinez, now an RN at New York-Presbyterian, agreed. While she said she was not aware of the gap between healthcare workers, she suggested that institutions “support pay transparency. When we aren’t able to discuss our salaries, we often are not aware that there are others with the same qualifications as us that are getting paid more to do the same job with the same demands.”
