http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/2010/03/equally_qualifi.html
Women working in the life sciences at academic medical centers make less money than equally qualified men, according to a new survey published today that also finds that men and women take on different roles during their professional careers.
In 2008 Catherine DesRoches and colleagues from the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital mailed surveys to more than 3,000 life sciences faculty members at the top 50 universities receiving federal funding for research at their medical schools. The more than 2,100 professors who responded reported how much research they had published and where; how many hours a week they worked in patient care, teaching, administration, or other professional activities such as editing journals; and how much money they made.
In the middle of the academic ranks, male and female associate professors reported similar work hours and responsibilities, but assistant and full professors’ work varied by sex. Women worked fewer hours than men when they were assistant professors, with less time spent on research than men, but when they were full professors, they worked more hours than men, largely because of administrative or other professional activities. Female full professors reported fewer publications than male full professors. The authors suggested senior women might be showing a trailblazer effect, being called on more often to increase female representation on journal boards or university committees.
After the authors took into account such factors as age, hours worked, published research, race, and geography, the women reported salaries that were on average $13,228 lower than similarly qualified men. “If you take the most highly qualified group of men and women at the senior rank, and you make all other things equal, the women are still getting paid less,” DesRoches said in an interview about the article appearing in the journal Academic Medicine.
The difference was greatest for professors in departments of medicine who were also MDs, about double the gap for scientists who were not clinicians.
“At the low end, the difference between male and female PhDs is about $6,000 a year. If you look at that over 30 years, that man would be paid about $200,000 more than a woman,” said DesRoches, who is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “We haven’t made as much progress as maybe we had hoped. We know this is something that universities are working on, but it’s a very difficult problem.”
Dr. Linda Pololi of Brandeis University is leading efforts to identify and understand why disparities persist between men and women in academic medicine as well as why minorities are not better represented on faculties and in leadership roles. She directs the National Initiative on Gender, Culture, and Leadership in Medicine: C (Culture) - Change at Brandeis.
On the salary differences, “It’s not a pipeline issue for women anymore,” she said in an interview, pointing out that medical school admissions are about equal for men and women. She called DesRoches’s study compelling. “We really needed an updated, in-depth look at this.”
In the same issue of the journal, Pololi and her colleagues write in a commentary, “Failure to realize the full participation and leadership potential of all faculty ? especially women and underrepresented minority faculty members ? remains a pressing problem and challenge in academic medicine today.”
