The Gender Wage Gap is Not New, but Negotiating for What’s Important Can Help

This Blog post represents a partnership between the Women in Medicine Summit and Healio Women in Oncology. An excerpt appears blow, and please find the full length piece at Healio’s Women in Oncology Blog

Significant disparities exist in pay, promotion and perks between the sexes in every field (not just in medicine), and this has been the case for centuries.

It’s unfair and it’s not right, but sadly that knowledge alone is not sufficient to change the status quo. Simply pointing out the disparities is very much analogous to the experiment in which Capuchin monkeys who, seeing their counterparts get grapes (the preferred payment for doing a task), throw the less favored cucumber back to investigators and rattle their cages. We can rail against the inequities, but what we truly need is a strategy to effect action.

So how do we do that? Some have advocated for greater transparency as a means to correct disparities. Certainly, some have found that transparent-structured compensation plans may reduce (but not eliminate) wage disparities. Others, however, have found that transparency alone does not mitigate inequities and may, in fact, exacerbate the feelings of discrimination that exist in the workplace.

And, as the COVID-19 pandemic taught us, it’s not all about the money. A recent report in the Harvard Business Review noted that more women physicians are either thinking of cutting back their clinical practice or leaving the workforce all together. Sure, pay inequities have something to do with that, but it’s also a reflection of some employers’ lack of flexibility for maternity leave, provision of child and elder care, and the myriad of other things that leave women feeling (to a greater degree than men) burned out and undervalued.

About the author: Anees B. Chagpar, MD, MSc, MPH, MA, MBA, FRCS(C), FACS, is a professor in the department of surgery Yale University School of Medicine. (Twitter: @AneesChagpar)