8 Ways to Promote Equal Pay in Nursing

Imagine the first few hours of your shift. Morning rounds are complete. The call bell rings, and IV pump alarms sound. There are medications to administer and blood transfusions to perform. A patient wants to be moved to a different room. Staff needs help with a combative patient. All this, and your shift has just begun.

Sound familiar? There’s no question that being a nurse is demanding. Nurses must multitask and handle difficult situations while providing patient-centered care. However, nursing jobs are stable, pay well, and remain in high demand.

The real problem isn’t the work. It’s that female nurses earn 10 cents less than their male counterparts. That’s $7,300 a year. Black, Hispanic and Latina, and Indigenous nurses make even less.

While male and female nurses draw equal salaries in some specialties, 87% of nurses are women. The nursing profession has a lot of work to do to close its gender pay gap.

Here, we discuss eight actionable ways to promote equal pay in nursing and empower nurses to help close the pay gap.

The gender pay gap is the ratio of female-to-male annual earnings for full-time workers. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act passed to end wage discrimination based on sex and gender. However, discrepancies in pay still exist today.

The pay gap is rooted in gender, racial, sexual orientation, and gender identity discrimination. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), women make 18 cents less than men, or 82 cents to every dollar a man makes.

White women’s pay gap is expected to close in 50 years. The wage gap for women of color is even wider, with a longer time frame to close. At the current rate:

Female nurses make less than male nurses, although women dominate the workforce. Regardless of educational level, experience, and age, women make 91 cents to every dollar a male nurse makes. Even female nurses with in-demand certifications earn less than their male counterparts.

While this disparity is grounded in gender discrimination, male and nonbinary nurses are reportedly more likely to negotiate their salaries than female nurses.

What can you do to help close the gender gap?

Recently, there have been massive undertakings to end gender-based pay disparities. The U.S. women’s soccer team is currently in a lawsuit with the United States Soccer Federation for equal pay. In addition, the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pushed for laws to end gender wage discrimination.

Ending the gender pay gap is a process that will take time. However, you can help on a smaller scale. Here are eight actionable ways you can advocate for pay equality.

Openly discussing your salary with co-workers can ignite a conversation about the gender and racial wage gap in nursing and encourage pay transparency. Knowing what your co-workers make may shock you and propel you to ask for a raise!

When you join your local nursing association or become a board member, your input helps to make decisions. You can also play a huge role in leading the discussion on nursing’s gender pay gap and help shape policies like:

Become familiar with lobby day, what’s on the agenda, and how laws are passed. Suggest exploring equal pay for women nurses.

Revisiting your salary and asking for higher wages during your performance review is another way to help close the gender pay gap. This might feel intimidating, so here are a few tips from an experienced nurse on how to negotiate a higher salary.

Gather information on salary negotiation and share what you’ve learned with your colleagues. Creating a space for an open dialogue about compensation can empower others to advocate for higher wages.

The talent acquisitions and financial team decides your salary. Suggest organizing a meet and greet with the team to encourage discussions on salary transparency.

Equal Pay Days highlight how many more days into the year women must work, on average, to reach a male’s salary. Because the wage gap is wider for some women than others, equal pay days for each demographic occur on different days throughout the year. Here are the Equal Pay Days for 2021:

According to Nurse.com’s 2020 Nurse Salary Research Report, nurses who worked in union hospitals enjoyed higher salaries. While union representation is higher in some states than others, there were significant salary differences among union-represented registered nurses (RNs).

Source: Nurse.com 2020 Nurse Salary Research Report

The gender pay gap will stop being front-page news when the gap closes. Nurses must work collectively to end wage disparities by negotiating their salaries, speaking out against gender discrimination, and demanding the same pay as their male counterparts.

According to BLS data, the workforce should add more than 221,000 new nursing positions from 2019-29. Let’s make positive changes now so future nurses can focus more on their patients than their salaries.