What Women Can Do About the Pay Gap in Medicine

gender pay gap
Where’s the rest of my paycheck? Getty / via

Note: This is a guest post about the gender pay gap in medicine, and what women can do about it, from Travis at Millennialmoola.com. He happens to be my financial advisor, as well as my very patient boyfriend. Anyone who has any student loans should definitely check out his site for a free calculator and some easy-to-digest financial advice. For someone somewhat money-illiterate like me, he has been a godsend.

The following article about income negotiation was especially helpful for me as I was looking for jobs out of fellowship. As a new graduate, I was nervous about negotiating: would I lose the offer if I negotiated? Would I be viewed as greedy? What should I negotiate for (income, vacation)? How much should I negotiate for? In the end, his advice (and the nagging thought that I’d have to shred my feminist card if I didn’t at least try) pushed me to negotiate for a better offer, and landed me where I am today!

Hope this advice helps you too!

What Women Can Do About the Gender Pay Gap in Medicine

Travis, Millennialmoola.com

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Kigali: On A First Arrival To Africa

kigali at night
kigali at night / source

Kigali is a city of hills and valleys. The land is green and lush with tall blades of grass, trees whose fruits I have eaten, but never seen. Paved roads settle in between the living things, almost like topographical lines. The road rises along the hills, then drops lazily down, then turns again. The sky throws itself high above the hills, black and flecked with stars at night, then turns into a blue, sunlit veil of an atmosphere during the day, so that you squint at the bright distant hills but never manage to clearly make them out.

I landed in Kigali at 1245 am, at a small, glossy airport that proclaimed itself as international and was decorated with all the gloss, color, and style of zebra skins. I stepped out past the baggage carousels and into the night with Jean Paul, the driver who had been waiting in a patient frantic for my gently tardy plane. I saw the stars and the green and the dark night and thought, so this is Africa, this is Rwanda. My first introduction to the continent, and to the country, and a most fortuitous introduction indeed.

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03/28 - 15:17

Chief Surgery Resident Dr. Arghavan Salles in the emergency room at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, California, United States on March 28, 2015.

Fear Is A Superpower: Don’t Run.

If you look at the posts on this site, you’ll notice a glaring gap between the month of August and the month of October. Maybe you’ve wondered why. Maybe you attributed it to the inconsistencies and waxing, waning enthusiasm of a new blogger.

Fear is, in fact, what happened.

 

I’m currently the last year of my fellowship. That’s 2 years of college, 4 years of medical school, 7 years of on-the-job training: over a decade spent preparing for a profession that I’m about to officially, independently embark on. If anything, I am over-prepared. I should be impatiently chomping at the bit. I should be eager to move on.

 

I was – am – terrified.

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“Doctor.” “Doctor.” Reviews on TV Medicine: A Young Doctor’s Notebook, And Other Stories

[This is a reworked repost on TV medicine from my old site, Everywhere and Here, whose URL my boyfriend told me in no uncertain terms that no one would ever remember. And it’s true: Call Me Watson is much snappier.

In any case, I love TV, and watch rather too much of it. Here, I’ll review shows depicting medicine on TV as to its relationship to reality, and proximity to entertainment. Enjoy!]

 

 

Those four words alone should pique your interest, if not promise a certain level of quality. Also, the letters BBC. And the names Daniel Radcliffe and Jon Hamm. And in fact, it delivers.

 

What you wouldn’t be able to tell from the above is that this is set in snowy Russia, and is based on the notebooks of Mikhail Bulgakov, a doctor in the 1900s during the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil wars. He went on to abandon his trade for that of a writer’s (a man after my own heart indeed), most famously writing the masterpiece, “The Master and Margarita.”

 

This BBC miniseries follows a new medical school graduate (played by Radcliffe), who aces all his medical examinations and therefore – this being Russia – is rewarded by being promptly carted off to the middle-of-nowhere (more specifically, Muryevo) to run a rural hospital by himself. Jon Hamm plays his future self, recently released from a mental institution for an unknown reason, both recollecting his story through his notebooks and interacting with his younger self. It’s surprisingly hilarious while being surprisingly dark, which makes sense, since it is produced by the British.

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sorry-300x178

Letters to A Young Resident, II: Stop Apologizing

Okay, before you immediately start to object: this isn’t meant to be blanket statement.

There are times when you should absolutely apologize in medicine, medical mistakes being the number one reason to apologize, and well.

But for the majority of residents who are not psychopaths, and certainly among majority of first year and female residents, the problem is, in fact, over-apologizing.

Stop.

 

sorry-300x178
source

 

As a Canadian, and as an only daughter in an Asian household, I understand your pain. Politeness to the point of discomfort is practically the mortar of my being. I grew up differential and soft-spoken. I lived within the rules set by school, by parents, and by society. When coloring, I drew crisply within the lines. And it worked well for a while: the quiet, nice girl who puts her head down and does her work well may not be well known, but she is certainly well loved (if and when she is recognized).

 

 

I would argue that medicine is no place for this sensibility.

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