Men’s Mustaches Beat Women In Jobs For Medical Doctors — Gender Pay Gap Loses By A Hair

A new study claims that men’s mustaches beat women in jobs within the medical profession. A doctor with a beard or a hairy lip may be a professional stereotype, but it also turns the gender gap divide may literally be by a hair. The researchers found that men with mustaches tended to dominate the top positions within university-associated medical centers, but do bushy faces really land the jobs in the American health care system?

In a related report by the Inquisitr, although women may not like the latest pay gap news, it turns out that 80 percent of women love those Movember mustaches, and about 20 percent of women would be more likely to date a guy growing a ‘stache in November.

The Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal may not have been reporting this particular bit of news in a serious fashion, since they admit they “evaluated each leader for the presence of facial hair regardless of sex.” Presumably, these results would include some female leaders who are adverse to waxing their lips, but the study did find that men’s mustaches beat women in jobs overall.

Their conclusion was also not too serious, since they said, “We believe that every department and institution should strive for a moustache index ?1.” That is presumed to be the British bias coming off in the report; although, the joke is apparently referring to women growing mustaches in order to secure the top positions.

The BMJ report says that men with mustaches held 19 percent of all the 1,018 department leader positions, while women only led in 13 percent of the medical departments. The leadership of the mustache brigade was very pronounced since only two schools, Washington University and Ohio State University, did not have top brass with a hairy lip. In fact, the mustache index was so high that only ” six of 20 specialties had more women than moustaches.”

According to a press release by the study’s authors, Dr. Mackenzie Wehner says the approach to discussing the gender gap may not be too serious, but the results are very serious.

“The lack of women in leadership roles in medicine is well-documented, but despite the eccentricities of the study, our results show that even when you focus solely on men with mustaches – which are rare – women are still outnumbered across various specialties,” he explained.

The gender gap in the medical field has grown more pronounced over time based upon an earlier 2013 report from the Inquisitr.

“[T]he gender gap for female doctors is startlingly higher than the average seven percent. In the 1980s the gender gap between male and female doctors was $33,840, or 20 percent. But in the last 10 years the gender gap for female doctors has grown to $56,019 per year, or 25.3 percent. This trend apparently affects female dentists and physician assistants.”

The gender pay gap is also affected by how women negotiate their salaries. Back in 2012, the National Bureau of Economic Research released a study where they noted how women approach salary negotiations differently from men.

“We find that when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women,” the researchers wrote. “However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, this difference disappears, and even tends to reverse. In terms of sorting, we find that men in contrast to women prefer job environments where the ‘rules of wage determination’ are ambiguous. This leads to the gender gap being much more pronounced in jobs that leave negotiation of wage ambiguous.”

Obviously, if mustaches beat women in jobs numbers, then the real solution for a woman is not to grow a hairy lip. In order to close the gender gap, the authors “point to the need for additional efforts to implement policies against gender discrimination and introduce family benefits equally across gender – including paid paternity and parental leave – as well as implementing predefined hiring criteria, job flexibility, and tenure clock extensions.”

[Photo by Jan Hetfleisch/Getty Images]