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A new study finds that the COVID-19 pandemic narrowed the wage gap between high and low paid workers in the health care industry, as the lowest earners saw the biggest boost in pay in the years since the pandemic began. The findings show a sharp disruption of a decades-long trend in which the wage gap had consistently widened, with high income earners enjoying the biggest pay gains.
Janette Dill, an associate health policy professor at the University of Minnesota, co-authored the Health Affairs study. She said her team at the U of M’s School of Public Health had witnessed this narrowing wage gap pattern in other industries and wanted to determine if it was also happening in the health care industry.
“We found that workers who had the lowest levels of education — so those with a high school degree or less — and those in positions that pay fairly low wages, like health care aides and assistants, had the largest wage gains following the pandemic,” Dill said. “And they were able to maintain those gains through 2023 and 2024.”
The gender and race wage gaps also narrowed, the study found, as Black and Hispanic workers had higher relative wage growth than white workers, and women’s pay rose faster than men’s.
Dill said the income growth in lower skilled health care industry jobs happened for a mix of reasons. The pandemic forced health care organizations to offer more competitive salaries in order to keep essential, lower-wage staff. These workers were receiving stimulus payments, which gave many of them more freedom in the labor market to stop working, demand higher wages or look for another job with higher pay.
“If you think back at that time, you know, you could go work as a nursing assistant in a nursing home, where those jobs are very difficult and you have a high risk of infection, or you could go work at Target and make more money,” Dill said.
Though this might seem like an unprecedented jump, Dill said it’s been a long time coming. She said wages for people working in health care without a college degree have been stagnant or declining for years, especially if one factors in inflation.
“It's an important correction in the labor market,” Dill said. “It just isn't sustainable to have people with wages that are not keeping up with the ways our economy is changing.”
And these pay level changes are benefitting a large and diverse group of workers. Dill explained that aides and assistants make up a much bigger percentage of health care sector workers, vastly outnumbering physicians or nurses.
Dill said that she’s glad to see growing equity in the health care field, but she said the industry will have to make changes to maintain it.
“It requires a lot of intentionality and policies that really promote more equal distribution to those at the lowest levels of the wage spectrum,” Dill said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re getting a lot of messages from the federal level that reducing inequality is an important priority.”
English (US) ·