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Female R.N.’s: You May Be Working for Less Pay than Your Male Counterparts

By Sherie Scarnati, B.S.N.
Surgical Breast Disease Center
The Western Pennsylvania Hospital

I graduated from The Western Pennsylvania Hospital School of Nursing in 1982. I was offered a salary, accepted it and began what has become a rather lengthy career in nursing. If I would have realized that the initial salary offer was negotiable, I would have taken measures to secure my financial future.

I will be graduating in May 2009 from Carlow University as a Master’s prepared Advance Practice Nurse. I will have the opportunity to make or break my new financial future during contract negotiations. I fully expect to reap the rewards of this educational journey through a well-negotiated employment and benefit package. Factors that will go against me include gender and job description: I am a female nurse.

The majority of hardworking, registered nurses in the United States of America are females. Based on gender alone, this article is a “must read” for each and every one of you. Did you accept the first salary you were offered, and then felt grateful for your sub-standard income? When our male counterparts heard the paltry figure that you accepted, they refused it! The reason for their refusal is that men do not work for less money than they believe they are worth. 

If your goal in life is to do the most amount of work for the least amount of money, stop reading now. If you go any further, you will learn life altering information that will positively impact your financial future and provide gender-based insight. The book that has changed my life is called Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Babcock, L. & Laschever S. (2003).

As I mentioned earlier, I am on the verge of a new career. As a student laborer with 600 clinical hours under my belt, I can attest to the fact that physician expectations of Certified Registered Nurse Practitioner’s (CRNP) far exceed those of a Physician Assistant’s (PA). We are expected to provide a level of service that meets physician standards, patient expectations, and our own self-imposed limits of satisfaction.

Although CRNP’s and PA’s are comparable at the most basic of levels, more is expected of CRNP’s because we are licensed to do more! We can see patients without a physician on-site, write orders that do not require a co-signature, and maintain our own prescriptive privileges. What we cannot do is work a 50 hour week for a 40 hour paycheck! So why do we continue to the right thing for less pay?

In surveys, 2.5 times more women than men said they feel "a great deal of apprehension" about negotiating. Females believe that what you see is what you get, situations cannot be changed, if huge salaries were possible then everyone would receive one, and it is simple not nice for a lady to ask. Male perceptions that promote successful negotiations include seeing life as full of opportunity, believing that most situations are flexible, rules are made to be broken, much can be gained by asking and always ask even if it looks impossible.

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