The now-infamous comment about the pay gap for women in medicine in the Dallas Medical Journal unfortunately represents a belief not as rare as one would hope. It is the belief that the gender pay gap in medicine is deserved.
While I do agree that if one works fewer hours one should expect to be paid less, data has shown that even after accounting for hours worked and other factors, women physicians are underpaid.
As expected Dr. Tigges and the Dallas Medical Journal ignited outrage on social media. But thanks to them we now are able to have a discussion about women physicians. Commonly held beliefs such as Dr. Tigges, especially when held by those in leadership and management roles are disrespectful and limit our advancement.
In addition to studies showing that women are indeed underpaid all things otherwise equal, there are those that show that not only are we as good as the men, in many instances, women physicians provide a better quality of care and achieve better outcomes for our patients.
I welcome this quote and the ensuing outrage for the discussions that they have raised. However, we are past debating whether a gender pay gap exists or not although it’s telling that many male physicians stayed out of the fray. What’s clear is women, myself included, ought to be more assertive in negotiating our salaries and institutions need to be more transparent in pay. But we need also to optimise the field of medicine generally to properly reflect the value of work being done. Cognitive specialists like myself (infectious disease) already suffer under the existing payment incentive structure that values high volume and procedural practices. It’s not that we are not working hard but that the system just doesn’t capture our value.
So the question begs itself. What metric are we using when we say a female physician “does not work as hard” as a male?
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