Gender and racial disparities are real in healthcare. Women are paid significantly less than men for the same work. That holds true in IT shops, for physicians as well as executive leadership and a new study focusing on the latter demonstrates that gender and racial scales are tipped toward men perhaps even more than previously thought.
A new survey by the Boston Globe, in fact, found that 80 percent of the 103 clinical department heads for the city’s six major teaching hospitals are men, and almost 90 percent are white. Blacks occupy only three department head positions and Hispanics only four. There is also a glaring gap in the ranks of women and Asians, despite their significant presence in the physician workforce. Women constitute 34 percent of physicians and 13 percent of all physicians are Asian.
