Gender disparities in academic medicine persist

Women in academic medicine in the United States do not advance as rapidly as men of similar achievement, and they are not compensated as well, researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine report.

Although such disparities have been reported previously, there have been no large, detailed studies, Dr. Arlene S. Ash and her associates note in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Moreover, there have been no efforts to account for confounding factors such as specialty, job characteristics and productivity. So between 1995 and 1996, her group polled 941 male and 873 female full-time faculty at 24 randomly selected medical schools.

They found that, for individuals with 15 to 19 years of seniority, 66 percent of the men and 47 percent of the women were full professors. After taking into consideration the possible influence of total career publications, hours worked per week, department type, and minority status, large deficits in rank remained.

Female physicians were also paid nearly $12,000 less than their male counterparts, and they received almost $5,000 less additional salary than men for each 10 years of seniority.

"I believe most administrations do not intend to discriminate," Ash told Reuters Health. "They just don't take seriously their responsibility to not do so."

For example, men are often more likely to be tapped to chair meetings or head more prestigious committees, she said. Male faculty members may get more lab space or be assigned more secretarial support.

So what would it mean for administrators to take these issues seriously? "It's a sine qua none," Ash continued. "If you are taking it seriously, you are tracking the data." And the data must be actively used to scrutinize behavior and think about what needs changing.

Women themselves, she added, have to get together to press for systems to be put in place to track these issues. Instead of immediately instituting lawsuits, "when individual women are passed over for promotions, they should speak up about it, nip it in the bud."

Although these findings are dated, they are probably no better today, Drs. Christine Laine and Barbara J. Turner point out in an accompanying editorial. They cite a U.S. Census Bureau report in June of 2004 that showed female physicians earned 63 cents for every dollar earned by men in the same positions.

"The medical profession should be mortified that no other profession in the United States exhibits greater salary disparities by sex," they write. Laine is with the American College of Physicians and Turner is at the University of Pennsylvania, both in Philadelphia.

They recommend that institutions develop greater transparency in their promotion and compensation practices, with close scrutiny of guidelines for academic advancement and salary calculations to ensure that they do not systematically discriminate against any single group of professionals.