Should Part-Time Female Doctors Make Full-Time Pay?

“No,” says Amy Alkon in this interesting blog post on the topic:

There’s an opinion piece in the Independent, headlined with “This junior doctors contract throws women under the bus. You’ll be shocked by the detail. It seems single parents – disproportionately women – are considered expendable.”

A junior doctor in the UK, Reena Aggarwal, writes that she is “locked in a bitter dispute with the government about the junior contract”:

Until now, salaries for female doctors in training have kept pace with men’s due to small annual pay awards to prevent part-time doctors – of whom the vast majority are women – earning less than their full-time colleagues over time. The new contract will remove these safeguards widening the gender pay gap in medicine.

Amy points out rightly that it is not fair for those who work part-time to get full-time pay: “Should I really be rewarded for the work I’m doing at the same rate as somebody who can only put in maybe half or less of what I do?”