Dr. Neeru Gupta is an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick. (Photo: Submitted)
A group of researchers at the University of New Brunswick have been given the go-ahead to start a research project examining gender-related pay gaps.
They’ll be looking specifically at health-care workers’ pay before and after the COVID-19 outbreak.
Dr. Neeru Gupta, the principal investigator for the project and associate professor of sociology, said there’s been very little done in research at national levels on this topic.
“It’s an issue that receives some attention in other fields but has received very little attention within the health-care field. I think there are a number of reasons for this,” she said.
Gupta said one of the reasons for the lack of attention has to do with how payments of physicians and other health-care providers fall under provincial jurisdiction.
“It’s a field that prides itself on evidence-based decision-making, and there’s still a resistance to admitting that gender disparities among healthcare workers exist,” she said.
Gupta said salaries in these professions that have high occupational health and safety risks are already lower than other areas.
“We’ve seen some changes recently just even during the pandemic, for example in recognition that some categories of healthcare workers in many jurisdictions were offered temporary pandemic pay bonuses, but I think this underlines a much broader concern,” she said.
The group will be looking at the trends using a gender-based analysis approach to discover if the Canadian health-care system may be exacerbating social inequalities.
The research will be used for longer-term planning and funding to optimize gender equity within the health-care sector.
The research team from UNB includes Dr. Gupta; Sarah Balcom, assistant professor in the faculty of nursing; Ismael Foroughi, postdoctoral fellow in the department of sociology; and Ivy Bourgeault, professor at the University of Ottawa and lead of the Canadian Health Workforce Network.
