Minding the Gap: Organizational Strategies to Promote Gender Equity in Academic Medicine During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Division of Hospital Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA; 2Section of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA; 3Department of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, CT, USA; 4Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; 5Department of Medicine, VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; 6Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, USA; 7Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, USA; 8Office of Faculty Affairs, University of Massachusetts Medical School-Baystate, Springfield, MA, USA.
J Gen Intern Med DOI: 10.1007/s11606-020-06269-0 © Society of General Internal Medicine 2020
pandemic and its sequelae are likely to T hehaveCOVID-19 disproportionate impact on women physicians, professionally and personally, and we must take steps to mitigate this undue burden. Women are more likely to be essential workers during the pandemic and comprise the majority of the healthcare workforce writ large.1 Compared with male colleagues, women in medicine also have increased responsibility for dependent care and domestic duties.2–7 In light of these additional roles and responsibilities, we are particularly concerned about women’s sustained productivity, career advancement, and compensation as well as potentially deleterious effects on their well-being and retention.8 As we move into the next phase of the pandemic, whether it be recovery or planning for a resurgence, it is imperative that healthcare institutions pay attention to the inequitable impact policies and practices may have on a significant portion of our physician workforce. Furthermore, it is critical that decisions made during the current public health crisis do not erode previous progress our profession has made toward gender equity. In this statement, we highlight four crucial concerns and recommend organizational strategies to prevent or mitigate each.
physicians experience one of the largest gender pay gaps in the country.10, 11 In the setting of financial hardship stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare institutions will likely be scrutinizing the cost of employee compensation and reducing payroll expenditures where possible.12 Given pre-existing salary disparities, we strongly encourage organizational vigilance to ensure women physicians are not disproportionately penalized during cost-cutting initiatives. Moreover, we recommend leaders approach compensation and professional effort reviews that result from budgetary “tightening” exercises as opportunities to identify and implement practices to narrow existing gender gaps. At a minimum, to ensure that adjustments deemed necessary for fiscal viability do not exacerbate gender disparities, we recommend the following to institutional leaders and their finance, compensation, and operations teams:
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