Coming from an all-empowering, all-girls school, the notion that: ‘women entering competitive professions such as Medicine would have to make the most of all possible opportunities to avoid disappointment’ was hardwired. Since the Equal Pay Act of 1970, young women have often been advised to ask for a higher salary in their professional working lives in order to offset preordained substandard salaries.

This is not to say that there are not legitimate reasons for disparities between salaries of men and women. It is a fact that if women wish to do all the other things women do (pregnancy, child rearing etc), they must take more time out of their working lives and subsequently lose out on the chance to increase their experience in the field and so progress to higher earning grades. However, in modern society women do not necessarily need to ‘fall behind’ in the career ladder after having a family. The traditional image of the mother staying at home has been replaced with children being raised with the help of child minding services and after school groups; so in modern society it follows that it is not the norm for a woman to miss out on so much simply because she has had a child. Appleby mentions a 28.6% pay gap, however he does not specify female doctors’ familial status and so we can’t make solid conclusions about whether the gap is due to “legitimate” reasons leading to differences in grade or “unexplained factors”.

If we took a broader overview of the situation without examining the details, we would see that the numbers don’t add up. If we consider the fact that by 2017 the medical workforce is predicted to be mostly female and that across the UK the medical school acceptance rate is 56% female, then the 28.6% pay gap between men and women would seem to not only devalue female doctors within the NHS, but target future budget cuts by penalizing its main workforce.

Even when we justify and legitimize the difference in pay due to, say, grade, we have to echo the blindingly obvious question of why this is the case. Is pay disparity between men and women in the NHS simply due to gender inequality – or is there a hidden financial, cost-cutting agenda in place?

1 Khan, Maham. Medicine- a woman’s world? BMJ 2012 Jan 05. http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=20006082.

Competing interests: None declared