Women in Academic Medicine: Equal to Men, Except in Pay

By Katherine Mangan
Chronicle of Higher Education

Women in academic medicine earn significantly less than men do, even when their professional activities and qualifications are comparable, according to a study whose results are being published in the April issue of Academic Medicine.

The study, conducted by the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital, also found that those women take on different roles over their professional careers, publishing fewer articles and serving on more committees. But that pattern alone does not explain the pay gap.

"One of the explanations you hear for the lower pay is that women work fewer hours and don't publish as much in the early years because they have more family responsibilities," said Catherine M. DesRoches, the lead researcher and an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. "So we wanted to find out what happens when we hold all of that constant" and compare men and women with comparable professional productivity.

The result? Female researchers earned $6,000 to $13,000 less per year than comparably qualified men. The gap widened to $15,000 a year for faculty members in departments of medicine. Over a 30-year career, the average female faculty member with a doctorate would earn $215,000 less than a similarly qualified man, Ms. DesRoches said.

The study was based on a 2007 survey of 3,080 randomly selected researchers in life-science departments at the 50 academic medical centers receiving the most money from the National Institutes of Health in 2004. About three-quarters of them responded to an anonymous questionnaire that asked about leadership positions they had held at their universities, on scientific journals, and on federal panels; their recent and total publishing history; the number of hours they had spent on teaching, patient care, research, and other professional activities; and their total pay.

Across all ranks, women had fewer publications than men did. The study also noted differences in work schedules. As assistant professors, women generally worked fewer hours than did comparably qualified men, mostly because they did less research. By the time they were full professors, they worked longer hours than their male counterparts did, mostly on administrative tasks rather than on patient care or research.

Ms. DesRoches noted that many female full professors juggled more committee assignments because committees seek gender balance and there are fewer women to pick from in the upper echelons of academic medicine.

Gender-based pay differences aren't confined to academic medicine. A survey last year by the American Association of University Professors found that, at every type of institution, male academics continued to earn more, on average, than did women with the same jobs.