Understanding & Addressing Faculty Salary Equity

Achieving salary equity in academic medicine is the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. There are tangible institutional benefits to addressing equity issues — including salary equity — and costs to ignoring them.

Beyond a moral imperative, failing to create equitable environments, of which salary-equity efforts are a part, can hamper institutional success through retention and recruitment costs, as well as through losses in research and clinical productivity.

Creating a plan to achieve salary equity shows a commitment to and can assist institutions in keeping the best and brightest in the academic medicine and science. It should be part of an ongoing strategy to foster a supportive culture for faculty.

The AAMC has developed a set of tools and resources to help your institution get started. There’s no easy or quick solution to address salary equity, but the below information can help you begin your understanding and strategy.

This publication, Exploring Salary Equity Among Medical School Leadership, presents for the first time aggregate data from the AAMC’s annual Dean’s Office Staff Compensation Survey and Dean’s Compensation Survey and examines salary equity among medical school deans and dean’s office leadership positions. This report builds off the AAMC’s first two faculty-focused reports addressing salary equity in academic medicine. In addition to this report, new data tables have been published on compensation for dean’s office staff leadership and compensation of medical school deans.

ACCESS THE REPORT

Understanding and addressing salary equity in academic medicine is critical to attracting and retaining talented faculty in U.S. medical schools and fulfilling institutional missions. This publication, Exploring Faculty Salary Equity at U.S. Medical Schools by Gender and Race/Ethnicity, explores salary equity as one of many institutional efforts that make up an overall strategy to promote an equitable culture and climate. Watch the webinar that explores the report.

Access the report

Our report, Promising Practices for Understanding and Addressing Salary Equity at US Medical Schools, is a good starting point for creating a strategy for salary equity.

It includes data on faculty compensation, promotion trends, and perceptions of the work environment, as well as promising practices from 11 medical schools that all institutions can use to begin or refine their own local salary equity efforts. 

Access the report

The Faculty Salary Equity Tool (FSET) allows institutions to examine trends in total compensation by gender, race/ethnicity, rank, degree, and department/specialty across the past five fiscal years for full-time faculty members at their own institutions as well as across medical school cohorts.

Graphic displays include mean and median comparisons of total compensation by gender and/or race/ethnicity in dollar amounts and cents on the dollar comparisons. The tool also includes a flat file of aggregated data for use in local institutional studies. The AAMC hopes that these data will provide a helpful resource for school-level equity studies and highlight departments/specialties that may need detailed analysis in local equity studies.

Note: Only available to deans, Principal Business Officers (PBOs), and designated Report institutional Users who have access to confidential, school-level data. The AAMC encourages deans and PBOs to share this tool with others on campus.

Need help getting started? This toolkit provides a wealth of resources from national data tables to sample school of medicine reports and salary dashboards that can help you begin addressing salary equity at your own institution.

Closing the gender pay gap in medicine
Leaders in academic medicine are working to address salary inequities. Learn how the report highlights the progress made to date — and the challenges yet to come. Read More on AAMCNews

Understanding and Addressing Faculty Salary Equity Webinar
This webinar will present data from the recent faculty salary analysis, explore organizational components of faculty salary equity studies and compensation, and take an in-depth look at effective practices from institutions highlighted in the publication for their efforts to address salary equity.

Please note: Some of the resources listed below are from organizations that require registration, membership, or purchase. We encourage you to collaborate with other leaders at your institution in exploring these resources, particularly those in Finance, Administration, and HR, who may already have institutional memberships to these organizations.