A study examining pay discrepancies between women and male physician researchers found on average men get $12,000 more than women, but could not account for a reason beyond speculation about salary negotiation tactics.
The University of Michigan study surveyed 800 participants who had received prestigious K08 and K23 grants from the National Institutes of Health.
One explanation for the study findings, published in the Journal of American Medicine today, was that women tend to go into less well compensated areas like pediatrics and obstetrics. Still, although these choices played a role it still left some unanswered questions about the relatively few leadership positions held by women. As one of the researchers who worked on the study put it in a Wall Street Journal Health Blog interview, “I think we weren’t expecting to find such a substantial, unexplained disparity,” said Dr. Reshma Jagsi, an associate professor of radiation oncology at Michigan. “It’s important to consider the role of unconscious gender bias.”
The women included in the survey, 247 of whom participated, were also less likely to move on to another institution, a move they could typically use leverage their position in their current workplace.
The study speculated that being less willing to negotiate salary as aggressively as men could be a contributing factor to the gender pay gap.
JAMA explored gender gap issue six years ago in a survey of authorship for six prestigious academic medical journals, a key measure of productivity and a factor that can make all the difference in getting a promotion. It found that 19 percent of senior authors were women, a statistic reflected in the percentage of women holding associate and full professor roles on clinical faculties of medical schools in 2004.
One of the conclusions cited from other gender gap studies in the article, in addition to encouraging more women to go into academic medicine, is the need for and greater use of mentors. Interestingly, a similar conclusion was reached at a panel discussion on women in life sciences held at the University City Science Center in Philadelphia earlier this spring. And not just women mentoring women. It’s certainly not an end all be all, but having a mentor can be critical to negotiating upward mobility in an institution.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
