297 - Assessment of Gender Equity in Pay using a Novel Z-Score based on National Benchmarks

Publication Number: 297.3720

Brittney Phillips, University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, Sacramento, CA, United States; Daniel J. Tancredi, University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, Sacramento, CA, United States; Satyan Lakshminrusimha, UC Davis, Sacramento, CA, United States; Janette Lee, University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, Sacramento, CA, United States

Background: In the Department of Pediatrics at UC Davis, 75.6% of faculty identify as female. A higher percentage of faculty at the assistant professor rank are female. In contrast, a higher percentage of faculty at the professor rank are male. In an effort to maintain gender equity amongst all faculty, the UC Davis Department of Pediatrics conducts an annual analysis of faculty salaries against AAMC benchmarks corrected for specialty, rank, and years in rank.

Objective: Describe a novel method of assessing gender equity in pay using Z-scores based on national benchmarks adjusted for specialty, rank, and years in rank.

Design/Methods: Using AAMC benchmarks, we assign salary to faculty using their specialty, rank, and years in rank. Assistant Professor faculty are brought in at the 50%ile benchmark. Our goal is for Associate Professors to reach the 50%ile benchmark by 4th year in rank. For Professors, the aim is for them to reach the 50%ile benchmark by the 6th year in rank.
For each subspecialty and rank, AAMC reports total compensation benchmarks for the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles. We log-transformed these and individual faculty member’s compensation, to make the data on each side of the 50th percentile closer in distribution to a half-normal distribution. We then converted each faculty member’s compensation into a rank- and subspecialty-adjusted Z-score, based on a linear interpolation/extrapolation involving for the two nearest relevant AAMC benchmark percentiles. A comparison of Z-scores among male and female faculty were compared. Within each rank, productivity (wRVU generated per year adjusted for clinical FTE percentiles calculated using Clinical Practice Solution Center benchmarks) was compared to compensation in a separate analysis.

Results: Productivity and salaries increased with implementation of benchmark-based salaries (figure 1). There was a significant increase in salaries with a mean of 0.87 (95% CI: 0.67, 1.05) from 2020 to 2024 with both genders. There was no significant difference in salary between genders after correcting for rank, position (chief, chair etc.,) and years in rank. [The differences in salary between genders was 0.09 (-0.21, 0.39) in 2020, -0.06 (-0.45, 0.33) in 2022, 0.10 (-0.18, 0.37) in 2023 and 0.11 (-0.14, 0.36) in 2024 (figure 2)].

Conclusion(s): In summary, the data confirms that by consistently using national benchmarks to assign salary, females and males both had a significant increase in Salary Z score over the past four years. Using a Z-score based on national benchmarks for rank, years in rank and position is an effective method to assess gender equity.

Figure 1
Productivity and salary Z scores of female (A) and male (B) for years 2020-2024. There was a significant increase in Z score for both salary and productivity in both genders from 2020 to 2024. The horizontal pink and teal lines represent the Z score of 0.

Figure 2
Z scores for total salary adjusted for specialty, rank and years in rank for female (pink boxes) and male (blue boxes). There was a significant increase in salaries for both genders from 2020 to 2024. The horizontal green line represents a Z score of 0.