An HIMSS survey looking at the inequity of gender pay in the health care IT profession found that, on average, men earned 25 percent more than women in the industry.
The survey, which was composed of online responses from 1,900 HIMSS members, found in the field of health care IT, men made on average $124,000 to women’s $101,000.
The disparity also stretched across both leadership and staff roles. In executive and senior management roles, women in for-profit fields earned less than 89 percent of their male counterparts, while women in non-profits earned 83 percent of male salaries.
Non-executive roles saw a little more parity, as women in for-profit enterprises earned 99.5 percent of men’s salaries in the same role. Women in non-profits earned 88.6 percent of their male counterparts’ pay.
This is the first year that HIMSS has looked at the gender pay gap in its compensation survey, something that Carla Smith, executive vice president of HIMSS North America, said was essential upon discovering the rate of disparity.
“There was something that when I was reading the findings in the compensation survey that caught my attention in an unpleasant way,” she said. “So I asked my research team to look into it for more. What they came back with lead to what you have now.
“We are very interested at HIMSS in bringing these kind of findings up to the light of day. We want to go back now and look at the previous compensation studies to see what we can discern of trends over time.”
The survey also found that only 3.6 percent of women surveyed served in executive management roles, compared to 11.8 percent of men. Men also outpaced women in senior management roles by 9 points with 19 percent of those surveyed.
Smith said, in 2017, that HIMSS would also include expanding the survey to study the gaps in compensation based on ethnicity to examine the impact on diversity in the health care IT field.
Overall, the survey showed health IT staffing continued to make gains after declines from 2010-2014.
