WCI #310: The Wage Gap in Medicine

This is the White Coat Investor Podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011. Hi and welcome to another White Coat Investor podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Disha Spath. Today we're going to be talking to Dr. Shikha Jain.

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Today's quote of the day is from Dave Ramsey. Financial peace isn't the acquisition of stuff. It's learning to live on less than you make so you can give money back and have money to invest. You can't win until you do this. Absolutely. It doesn't matter how much we earn. We do not get a pass on math. We need to have a delta between our income and our expenses. That's when we can put that delta to work. Get it investing. Get it working for us to build our wealth so that we can give money back to our communities, to any of our favorite charities and have money to keep our families stable.

To.

To have peace in our life, to have financial peace. Because when we buy stuff, it only brings joy for a few days. It's very transient. Financial peace is not transient. It makes you sleep better at night. It gives you options. It keeps you happy. It gives you freedom to go pursue your happiness. So absolutely, we need to learn to live on less than we make. And it's fortunate that doctors do have a good income so we can both live a happy life and build financial peace at the same time. It's possible. It's still possible. So today we're going to be talking about the gender wage gap with Dr. Shikha Jain. And I want to tell you about a happy hour that I've put together. An hour for women, or anyone who's female identifying, to get together and just talk about money in a safe space. My intent with this was to create community within the women of White Coat Investors so that we can just have a place where we can talk about money and have no judgment and have people that are in the same boat as us, give us advice so that we can share our struggles and just chit chat about money. Because we don't have enough of those spaces in real life, we are creating them virtually here at the Y Code Investor. So come and join us. You know we just bring your favorite drink. We just sit around and chit chat about whatever you want to talk about. You can sign up@WhiteCoatedMaster.com HappyHour We've had some really good showings recently and several women that have come multiple times to share their wisdom and to learn from others and it's been a really interesting conversation. So I hope you can join us now. It's my pleasure to introduce our guest for today, Dr. Shikha Jain. We are really lucky to have Dr. Shika Jain here on the White Coat Investor podcast. Dr. Shika Jain is a board certified Hematology and Oncology physician. She's a tenured Associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She's the Director of Communication Strategies and Medicine and the Associate Director of Oncology Communication and Digital Innovation at the University of Illinois Cancer Center. Dr. Jain is the founder and president of the 501c3 nonprofit Women in Medicine and the founder and Chair of the Women in Medicine Summit. She is the CEO and co founder of the action, advocacy and amplification organization impact. Dr. Jain was named one of Medscape's 25 Rising Stars in Medicine in 2020, one of Modern Healthcare's Top 25 Emerging Leaders in 2019, and also awarded the Rising Star Award by the Lead oncology conferen in 2019. She's a nationally renowned keynote speaker and has written for several national publications including USA Today, cnn, Good Morning America, Scientific American, the Hill, US News, Newsweek, and has been interviewed in the New York Times and Washington Post. She's a regular TV contributor on Fox 32 and has been a guest on ABC 7, CBS, WGN and other national media outlets. Welcome Dr. Jain.

Thanks so much for having me. This is going to be really fun. I'm excited for this conversation.

I'm out of breath reading your introduction. That is quite impressive. I saw you on TV this morning.

I think I need to start sending a shorter bio.

Oh no. I mean, actually this was the short version of your bio. The longer version was even more impressive. But thank you so much for being here. So today we're going to be diving into being Women in Medicine. As I said earlier, you are the founder of the Women in Medicine Summit and I've been so fortunate to be invited to speak there last couple of years. It's really a transformative experience for women to talk about our struggles, our experience, and to commiserate and learn from each other. Can you tell us a little bit about you and what brought you to start this amazing organization?

Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been a long road. I will say we've grown quite a bit since our first year. I started the Women in Medicine Summit because I actually had been on maternity leave with my twins. So I have three kids, eight, five and five now. And I went on maternity leave, and I was doing more on Twitter because I had recently published some op eds, my institution had said, you need to get more engaged on social media. And I started to read what other women in medicine were sharing about things that had happened to them. And. And I realized that a lot of things that had happened to me throughout my training and my career were not because I wasn't a good physician, not because I didn't deserve a certain award or accolade or opportunity, but in actuality, it was because there were a lot of barriers in the healthcare system that were intrinsic to the way the system was set up. And because I had never talked to anyone about it, because I'd never told anyone about my struggles. I just thought that I was the problem. And I thought that I had really not done something right and that had resulted. Resulted in whatever the outcomes were. And so I came back from maternity leave with this newfound desire to create an opportunity for women to come together and really talk about these challenges. But more than that, because my dad's a surgeon and has told me, you don't just come with problems, you come with solutions. So for me, the opportunity to create a conference that was really about talking about the problems, but then really focusing on solutions. So providing professional development, providing ways to fix the system, providing ways to get allies so male allies involved and engaged. These were all things that were really important to me because I felt like if I'd had something like that earlier in my career, I may have had a different experience going through training and then as a junior faculty. And so I created this summit. And the first year was. It was really successful. I was fortunate in that the year before, I'd actually created Women in Medicine programming at Northwestern, where I had been on faculty at the time. And so I used my knowledge from that event to expand and grow this Women in Medicine Summit. And since then, it's become this amazing conference where what I've been told, I can say this objectively even though, you know, subjectively, I think it's amazing since I made it. But objectively, people have told me that it's been life changing for them. It's been transformative, as you mentioned, because not only do you get the leadership training, not only do you get the negotiation skills, the financial skills from you when you spend speak there and the cme, you also create these networks and communities across the country and now across the globe that have actually resulted in many of the people who attend getting opportunities for media appearances, getting opportunities for collaboration and research, getting mentorship and sponsorship opportunities. So the connections that have been forged at the last couple of summits have really resulted in the advancement of countless women in medicine. And, and my hope is that as we continue to grow, we continue to see not only women, but also men who are taking up the torch and figuring out ways to fix the system within their own institutions and nationally. And actually, the first person who registered for the 2023 summit was a man. So I am really excited that we have a lot of male allies who are attending now because we created programming dedicated to allyship as well and helping men understand how they can be more inclusive leaders and how they can really work towards creating environments and creating structures and systems that allow for more diversity and more leadership at the top. That is not just the same homogenous group of people we've seen for the last hundred years.

That's amazing. Tell us a little bit more about what brought you to medicine and what your experience was in medicine that really prompted you to start this huge movement.

So I knew that I wanted to be a doctor since I was a little kid. You know, there were times in college where I dabbled with other ideas, but I really thought that I wanted to be a doctor from the time I was little and I would shadow my dad, I would be, you know, six, seven years old and it'd be a Sunday and I'd have nothing to do. So my dad would take me to the hospital to round on his post op patients. And seeing that relationship that my dad had with his patients either in the community or or in the hospital, to me that was such a special relationship and I really loved the science. The more I learned about medicine, I really was just enthralled by being able to take care of people, help people navigate sometimes the most difficult parts of their lives, and then develop these long lasting relationships with patients and their families. So that's how I decided to go into medicine. The challenge was as I went through my training and as I became Faculty. I started to notice that I was being treated a little bit differently than my. Than some of my colleagues. And I initially thought, again, it must be me, because the way I was raised was, you work hard, you will succeed if you realize you have deficiencies, you work on them, you improve on them, and then you will continue to grow. Unfortunately, what I saw happening to myself and my colleagues would be two people would be exactly the same, let's say on their CV or in their accomplishments or how they presented on rounds. And somehow I kept noticing the men were getting offered the leadership positions, the men were getting offered opportunities for networking, or they were getting offered opportunities to collaborate on research. I actually had people tell me that the work I was doing was a waste of time. I had people tell me that the work I was doing was not gonna contribute to the national dialogue. When I found out I was pregnant, I had people tell me that I was failing the medical field because I was taking time off for maternity leave, which I did not take as much time as you really should take after you've had a C section. I was back as quickly as possible because I didn't want to impact my training. When I found out I was pregnant with twins, I had people telling me, oh, I was going to put you up for this opportunity, but now I'm not going to because you're having twins, so I can't imagine you'd want to. When I interviewed for a position, I had a person actually tell me to my face that I would never be able to go full time because he assumed I wanted more children. And so there was no reason for me to go full time. So he would take on any extra patients that came on. And these are just the more benign comments. I had people sexually harass me. I had people basically threaten me. And I honestly brushed all of these things off because I really assumed that I had done something wrong. And it wasn't until I started speaking to other women that I realized that my experience was not unique to me. My husband, who is my boyfriend at the time, used to ask me, why does this stuff keep happening to you? And initially I thought, yeah, that's a good question. Why does this stuff keep happening to me? It's not happening to him. And then when I started talking to other women, I said, hey, honey, why don't you talk to some of the other women that you work with and just mention. Don't say it's me. Just mention the experiences that I've had and see what they say. And, you know, if they say wow, that's really strange. Then. Then you're right. If this is something that's just happening to me. And he came back to me and he said, oh, my gosh, this is happening to so many people. And I said, I know. And he said, why do I not know about it? And I said, well, one, you're a man, so it hasn't happened to you, so you don't see it. And two, I said, there's a stigma about talking about these things. I mean, I don't talk about this to anyone, because if I talk about it to someone, they're going to think that I am less than or that I am to blame, because that's what's happened to my other female colleagues who brought these things up. And so, for me, the reason that I really ended up in this position doing this work, which, if you'd asked me 10 years ago, there's no way, not a chance I would have thought I'd be doing this particular work in healthcare. But it became so pervasive and so egregious in some of these situations that I knew, being the person that I am, I see a problem, I want to fix it. I couldn't imagine continuing on in health care without trying to do something to fix these problems.

Yeah, your message really hits a note with everyone because, like you said, it is a pervasive problem, and a lot of us don't want to bring it up because it's makes us feel, you know, we don't want to be the victim. We are the type of people that are, you know, willing and able to pull ourselves up through our, you know, our efforts and, you know, with our bootstraps. And we certainly don't want to admit that there's anything else going on that could be hindering us. So thank you so much for bringing that to light. You know, we are a financial podcast, so we should talk about the money portion of it, too. You know, there's a lot of talk about a gender wage gap. It's been talked about throughout society, and especially in medicine. There seems to be reports of a wage gap. Is it real? Shekha, do you think that's. That's a real thing?

100%. It's real. It's not even an opinion. I speak on this all the time, and oftentimes I get the one person who says, well, in my practice, everyone gets paid the same. And I say, that's great. Your anecdotal evidence and anecdotal experience is really no match for the amount of mountains and Mountains of data, objective data we have, that proves the pay gap is not only real, it's quite bad. And we've actually shown. Dr. Vinnie Arora published a paper just a few years ago showing for female physicians, over a projected 40 year career, they can lose up to $2 million in their career. And all of these studies that we talk about, these studies take into account, because the excuses I get is, oh, women get pregnant, women go part time. All of these studies have taken into account maternity leave, family leave, part time versus full time, RVU generation. They've taken into account all of these things. And they still, without fail, have shown a persistent wage gap, which we see in society, as you mentioned, and for women with intersectional identities, for women of color, the wage gap is even more profound. And so it's not a question of is there a wage gap, It's a question of how do we fix this wage gap that we 100% know exists.

What are some factors that might explain this wage gap?

There's a lot of things that factor into it. So number one, I want everyone to remember that when the healthcare system was created, women were not in the healthcare workforce. And so the way that we compensate our physicians is really, and not just physicians, nurses as well. There's a wage gap in the nursing field as well. When you look at the way that we compensate people, the work that is usually dedicated or allocated to women is not compensated. Women are often allocated to what Dr. Julie Silver refers to as citizenship tasks. So getting put on committees, organizing potlucks, working on DEI initiatives, working on mental health, working on wellness, a lot of those things are really relegated into the female category often. And that work is often uncompensated. And people do it in their free time because they know it's important. McKinsey and Lean in came out with a report a couple years ago that showed during the pandemic, the majority of the invisible work that was done during the pandemic was done by women. And when we talk about invisible work, again, we talk about things like making sure your employees are happy and healthy, making sure mental health is taken care of, making sure that diversity and equity are at the forefront. And many institutions and organizations get awards for these things. They get more money for these things. They get accolades because they're doing so well, but that work is not compensated. And so, and not only is it not compensated, it's not even really recognized or awarded. In the survey that McKinsey put out, the majority of the women surveyed said they never felt like they had been Told that they were doing a good job and many of them were considering leaving the workforce altogether. Dr. Amy Gottlieb with the AAMC made a comment when the AAMC report came out talking about the wage gap. And she said, the problem is the way healthcare compensates people. It devalues the contributions of women. So we really need to think about how we compensate people, and we need to readjust what we are compensating for. The second really big issue that there was a paper that just came out recently on is the amount of time women spend with patients and the amount of time women spend on the EMR responding to patients. So the data shows that women get more messages from their patients, and women spend more time responding and doing that work and spending time in the electronic medical record, not because they aren't tech savvy, not because they don't understand how to use it, but because they simply just have more work to do. And it's been hypothesized it's because patients often feel that women are better communicators. They feel more comfortable talking to them. They feel more comfortable just messaging them as if it's an email. And so that time, again, it's not compensated and it's not valued. And all of this has resulted in studies coming out that shows that the outcomes of the patients that are being treated by female physicians are actually better in some situations than their male colleagues. There was a study that showed women physicians had lower readmission rates. Women physicians had lower mortality and morbidity with their patients. Women surgeons who operated on women patients actually had less complications and less mortalities. So all of this just goes to show that women are working extremely hard and they're providing exceptional care, but the work they're doing is not compensated at the same level as the work that their male colleagues are doing.

It does seem so insurmountable, the amount of factors that go into this wage gap. What can women do to overcome it on an individual basis? What can we do as women in medicine to get better contracts, to get better compensation?

There's a lot that we can do. So from an individual standpoint, I think it's really important to have allies and people in your corner. You need to have sponsors, you need to have staff stakeholders who care about you staying at the institution, who can help you negotiate. They may be able to help you by telling you what other people's salaries are. They may be able to help you by telling you what you should be asking for. I actually have emailed people before negotiating for A new contract and said, what all should I be asking for? I have no idea what I should ask. And men do it all the time. I mean, I've had men reach out to me, men reach out to each other. So finding people to ask really the questions of what should I be asking for and what should I be getting paid? You should be looking at the national data and looking what the median and averages of somebody in your position, in your location. That is, there's MGMA data that you can access that can help you with that information. And at the end of the day, you know, this isn't a man versus woman thing. I'm talking about gender in the binary because that's how most of the studies have been done. But this isn't a men versus women situation. This is really trying to find the right allies and stakeholders who are going to help you negotiate for yourself and make sure you don't undervalue yourself or undersell yourself because women often don't like asking. It's uncomfortable. Even I feel uncomfortable when I ask my boss, I want more protected time for this. I'm doing this much work, I feel like I should be compensated for this. It's always we've been taught not to talk about money. We've been taught that it's not polite to talk about your salary or your money. And that is how we've ended up in the situation that we're in today. I think from a leadership standpoint, we really need to be focusing on transparency, which can be very difficult. I know a lot of institutions have hired an outside consulting firm to do kind of analysis and an audit of what their pay looks like. But then that data is often not given to the employees or the people who work in the hospital or the institution. So transparency is really key and we need to be advocating for ourselves and for others. When I have my fellows who are negotiating for new contracts, I will tell them, okay, I know you're going for your first negotiation. Here are the things that you should ask for. Figure out what are your non negotiables. There are some things that you are absolutely must. Like I must have X number of weeks of vacation. I must have X amount of CME funding. I must have X amount of a bonus or of a salary that I'm starting with. There are some things that are going to be non negotiable and then there's some things that you need to think about. Well, is this something that we could negotiate on? I always say ask for more than what you actually want because if you shoot for the stars and you fall around the clouds, I mean, that's better than falling down on the ground. So find out what you really need and think ahead of time. What is your floor and what is your ceiling?

Okay, so you mentioned finding allies and sponsors. Can you elaborate on that for me?

Yeah, it's really important to find allies and sponsors. And not just. It doesn't just have to be people in leadership. It can also be allies and sponsors who are at your same level. I often talk to a person who's recently negotiated a contract at the same institution, and I'll say, what did you ask for? Do you have any ideas on what I should or shouldn't ask for? It does help having allies in leadership. And at the end of the day, everyone who you work for is going to want you to be successful. And so the way I always frame it is I want to exceed your expectations in this position. I want to be the best employee, the most physician, the best whatever it is that you are hiring in order to meet and exceed your expectations. These are the things that I need, and that's kind of how I approach it. And when you find those allies, they can sometimes help you and say, well, these things are not going to happen, but these things are negotiable. So sometimes what I do is I will talk to one of those allies ahead of time and I will say, this is what I'm going in with. Do you think this is good? How should I present this? Because at the end of the day, you need to present it in a way where the person you're talking to is going to respond positively. You don't want to leave with a negative feeling in your stomach or in their stomach. And so pitching it to one of those allies that you found ahead of time can be really helpful. And again, you can do it to people at your own level. And you can also do it at somebody who's more senior than you, who might have more experience. And it doesn't have to be somebody at your institution. Most of the people who I've gone to have been people at other institutions, because then what you can say is, well, I know at University X or at hospital System X, this is what they offer to their employees. And this is what I would like to ask, because I know this is what's being offered down the street. So sometimes it can be really helpful to even have those allies outside of your own institution.

And how do you go about finding these allies and sponsors?

That is a tough one, because it depends on where you are in your career. If you're a trainee, talk to the people within your organization. Talk to somebody who you've been doing research with or mentorship with. Find somebody who is doing what you want to do and ask them. Social media is a great way to find people like that. I found a lot of amazing allies, sponsors, mentors, and just listening ears through Twitter. And what I've done sometimes is I'll tweet out, I'm looking for someone who knows about X and people will reach out. Sometimes what I do is I will find somebody who's doing exactly what I want to do and I will message them and say, hey, I'm looking for, for a position. I'm negotiating. Do you have a few minutes to talk? I'd love to hear about your position and how you negotiated for what you got. I've had people reach out to me. So I am, I think, one of the first, if not the first director of communication for a cancer center in the country. And it's not a really known position. I created it and I've had people reach out to me and say, I'm meeting with my leadership tomorrow and I want to have a position similar to yours. What did you ask for? How did you get it paid for? What are the things that you put in the job description? So find someone who's doing what you want to do, whether it's at your institution or not, and you can email them, you can send them a message through social media. You can ask if one of your mentors knows them and can connect you. So there's lots of ways to do that. Sometimes you just have to step outside of your comfort zone.

Yeah, I really found that people are so helpful and willing to offer information if you just reach out and ask. So thank you so much for doing that for other people and I highly encourage other women to do the same. So going back, you mentioned the COVID pandemic and how it sort of affected the wage gap. How has the COVID pandemic affected women in medicine? I happen to know you recently wrote a paper about it.

I did recently write a paper about it. So what we've seen with the pandemic is women are working more at home and so they're increasing their homework responsibilities. I mean, how many of us had to, if we have children, had to do virtual learning with our children while also trying to manage our full time jobs?

Oh my God.

Women are doing more work at home in general. That's kind of societally how the system has been set up. We're seeing more men take on more of that work now. But we saw that gap widen during the pandemic and sick leave, taking care of elderly family members. That's another thing that women started having to do more at home, arranging vaccine appointments, getting doctor's appointments, all of that stuff that before women typically who were working had a pretty good system in place. That system kind of crumbled with childcare and schools being closed and not being able to have nannies or babysitters in the house. So that was a huge challenge. We're seeing women publish less. And again, it's not because women aren't ambitious and women aren't interested. It's because there's a finite number of hours in the day. And when you get 6,000 other things piled on your shoulders, it's sometimes hard to prioritize things like academic publications. And not only that, again, women weren't getting offered those opportunities for the same reason that I mentioned earlier. People think, oh, they're too busy doing home things, so I'm not even going to offer them the opportunity. We also saw women just having less time for everything that's been documented and documented that we saw a significant change in the amount of time that women had to do things like zoom, virtual happy hours or socializing after work and things like that. We also saw a widening of the pay gap. And what happened was, I don't know if you remember, near the beginning of the pandemic, there were freezes put on for bonuses and there were freezes put on for promotions because everything was kind of focused on the pandemic response. And the thought was that these would be temporary, but unfortunately even a short amount of time where you have your bonuses frozen or you have your ability to ascend and get a higher amount of a salary to be frozen for a short amount of time, that can actually have long term impacts on your overall ability to make X amount of dollars over a career. And so the temporary changes that we saw at the beginning of the pandemic and the temporary kind of stop gaps that were put in place, we're starting to see now how they're really impacting women in medicine and how they're going to continue to impact them probably for years to come.

Absolutely. So we've really covered a lot of great topics here. Thank you. Dr. Jain, do you have any parting thoughts for our listeners? Any way to lift them up and help them get over this wage gap, get over Covid's impact on us?

Well, you know, I am always a solutions type person. And I am typically pretty positive. Although a lot of the stuff I talk about seems very depressing and Sad because it's 2023 and we still have all of these pervasive inequities. My biggest challenge to everyone out there is thinking really hard about why do these systems still exist the way they do and who are they really serving? Because at the end of the day, we have a healthcare crisis for everyone. It's not just women. The pandemic has really laid bare the deficiencies in our health care system and it's resulted in what they call a great resignation where we see so many physicians, nurses, healthcare workers, men and women leaving the field. At the end of the day, when we advocate for people to be treated equitably, when we advocate for men and women and people of all colors and all genders to be paid equally, to be treated equally, to be advanced equitably, we really end up with a trickle down effect where the patients benefit, a trickle down effect where the institutions benefit. Studies have shown that institutions with more diversity at the top actually have higher retention rates. They get more awards, they get more accolades, they get more money. So all of these things, regardless of whether you think it's the right thing to do or not, they have positive impacts at all levels. So it's really past time for us to shine a light on this and for us to fix it. People have been talking about this for decades and there are so many people who have worked so hard to try to move things forward. Forward. We're at a point now where we're at a watershed moment, where we have an opportunity to really fix the system and repair and replace a lot of these structures that have been placed for years that are very antiquated. So I encourage you to think critically about what you as an individual can do to start working towards fixing some of these challenges we talked about. Think outside of your normal circle, offer opportunities to people you wouldn't normally think of. And if you're in leadership, it's time to start thinking really critically about what am I doing at my institution to make sure that we are really focusing on providing an equitable environment for the people who work here and for our patients. Because at the end of the day, it's not about DEI or diversity, equity and inclusion. It's not about that buzzword. It's really about figuring out how to provide the best care to our patients. And the data consistently shows that in order to do that, we need to make sure we're also treating our health care Workers equitably. And so I encourage everyone to come to the Women in medicine summit. It's September 22nd and 23rd in Chicago. Open to people of all genders and at all stages in their careers. Whether you're retired or in the C suite or just starting out and first year attending, there's a lot of opportunities for growth and leadership development for people of all genders. We have a lot of other programming through our Women in Medicine nonprofit as well. So whether it's through our organization and through other organizations, I would recommend you looking for those resources because a lot of them exist and they can really help you transform your organization and they can help you transform your own personal and professional life to lead a life where you're actually happy in your job, where you're actually wanting to go to work, where you actually feel excited and you remember why you went into medicine in the first place. It's possible to retain that joy for your entire career. We just need to be thinking, how do we really protect and take care of our health care workers to make sure our healthcare system doesn't completely implode as we continue to navigate the long term outcomes of this pandemic.

Thank you. Dr. Jain, where can our listeners find you if they have more questions?

Well, I'm pretty easy to find. I'm on Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook. I'm ikajanemd on most of those platforms. On LinkedIn, I think I'm shikajanemdfacp. You can also find me on the Women in Medicine social media handles IM summit on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook as well, and Instagram as well. And I have a website, shikajanemd.com where you can find ways to contact me there as well. And I'd be happy to hear from anyone who's interested in getting involved or just talking more about any of these topics.

Thank you so much, Dr. Jain for coming and sharing your wisdom with us and for sharing your time with us today. It's been a really wonderful conversation.

Thanks so much for having me.

Absolutely. A big thanks to Dr. Shika Jain for coming on the show and sharing her wisdom. Like she said, there's really no question that the gender wage gap is real. In a study published by Dr. Whaley EHL in 2021, they found that over the course of a simulated 40 year care, male physicians earned an average adjusted gross income of $8,300,000 compared to an average $6,200,000 and change for female physicians. So over the course of a career female US physicians are estimated to earn $2 million less than their male US physician counterparts, and that's after adjusting for factors that may otherwise explain observed differences in income, such as hours worked, clinical revenue, practice type, and specialty. The gap would higher if they hadn't adjusted for all of these. Several studies, including Dr. Jain's, have shown that the COVID pandemic has actually worsened this pay gap. So what's to be done? Well, Dr. Jain offered some very actionable suggestions on how we can fix this in our workplaces. First of all, women can advocate for themselves and talk to those around them. We can seek out mentors and mentees and advocate for others on their behalf and find advocates for ourselves. Administrators can be more cognizant of the wage gap and offer equal pay for equal work. They can help nurture women's groups in their workplaces. They can also help close the wage gap by offering the same administrative positions and publication opportunities to females as they do males looking at merit instead of presumptions Surely there's a lot of work to be done, but this conversation is a start. Thank you for listening today.

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So don't forget about our Women's Happy Hours. Www.whitecoatinvestor.com HappyAur is where you sign up for our no Strings Attached happy hour of talking between women. This is my effort to create a safe space for women to talk about and coordinate and find those mentors and mentees that we're talking about. This is where we build community and get our women and anyone who is female identifying in our community to get together and get to know each other. Please leave us a five star review and tell your friends about the podcast. That's how we get the word out. That's how we keep our podcast going. Here's medical student from 2021. Excellent. A worthwhile listen for anyone at any stage in their medical career. Short and to the point. I like it. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Keep your head up, shoulders back. You've got this and we can help at the White Coat Investor the hosts of the White Coat Investor podcast are not licensed accountants, attorneys or financial advisors. This podcast is free entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.