Nov. 8, Election Day, can’t come soon enough for some. For others who have viewed the campaigns first with bemusement and later with disbelief, closing in on that date is likely going to cause a sense of dread. There’s a decent chance that this election, like the election that put President Barack Obama into office, will register another historic first. If one of the candidates from the Democrat party wins, we’ll have either our first Jewish president in Bernie Sanders or our first female president in Hillary Clinton.
It’s the latter that has received significantly more ink from the media, and salary inequality is one of the reasons the story needs to be told more. In 2016, women are still falling far short on the salary scale when compared to men with the same experience and expertise. This is especially true in the tech world where the challenge isn’t only around leveling the income field, but also around attracting more women to the field.
In December, HIMSS North America released the society’s biannual Compensation Survey. The report, available for free to HIMSS members, details findings that raise concerns about how well the health IT sector attracts new hires and how it does with retaining health IT professionals. One of the other findings detailed in the report provides salary information that clearly shows a large gap between the salaries of male and female health IT professionals. On average, full-time health IT professionals earned overall compensation of about $100,000 — unless you were looking at males, then the compensation at the same level of experience and responsibility brought in an average overall compensation of about $124,000.
Those disparities only increase the higher up the career ladder one climbs. For executive- level and senior management-level positions in health IT, the compensation for female professionals averages just 63 percent that of their male counterparts during their first year in the role, and it takes 15 years to pull level. The differences span both for-profit and nonprofit organizations with nonprofit being the bigger offender at the executive level. On the non-executive level, for-profit organizations may have finally taken notice. There, the compensation for women averages just .5 percent below that of their male counterparts.
The IT impact
It’s clear IT has an image problem when it comes to gender equality. The HIMSS Compensation Survey isn’t the first to point this out, it’s just a more recent example and specific to health care. Apple and Google continue to struggle to attract more women to their respective teams, both to assuage the concerns of at least half the population, but also to diversify, in order to bring in the best and brightest minds.
In health IT, the struggle to attract females to what has been a boy’s club for decades is significant, but necessary — there is lots of money on the table. Starting with The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, hospitals and medical professionals have been incentivized or penalized to get with the program of using programs and other technology to improve process, and more importantly, to improve patient care. Since the Meaningful Use incentives first started rolling in more than five years ago, the federal government has rewarded those meeting the set criteria to the tune of nearly $32 billion by the close of 2015. Yet even those facilities that may have felt they were doing well enough without the incentives had a valid motive for implementing EHR systems — they didn’t want to get hit with penalties.
For IT professionals this rush by facilities to reach their goals (incentive or penalty avoidance) meant an uptick in job openings, more power for salary demands and an elevated role to play in the success of their hospitals. But the pendulum started to swing the other way a little by 2012. By then, many facilities had their EHRs implemented and staff in place, so hiring in the health IT sector gradually slowed. By 2014, according to a finding from HIMSS, the percentage of hospitals and other facilities looking to hire health IT professionals was about 40 percent, or a little over half what it had been in 2010. Likewise, the number of organizations looking to reduce health IT staffing had climbed, although still a modest number at about 6 percent.
Through all this, while more women were finding positions in health IT, they were finding positions at lower pay rates with lower compensation packages. Fortunately, health IT is on an upswing again as more hospitals look to tap into the power of health care analytics to shift focus to preventive care instead of reactive care. Population health management is the next great frontier for these health IT professionals, and the women that work in the field today will continue to raise the silicon ceiling for those that follow.
And as for Clinton? If she does become president, she stands to make the same salary President Obama and President George W. Bush made, and in fact, her salary, at $400,000 per year, plus benefits would be double what Bill Clinton made during his years as president.
Date: April 2, 2016