Gender discrimination still an issue for women doctors

In the Courts. By Bonnie Booth, AMNews contributor. Oct. 8, 2007.

It wasn't that Deborah L. Pierce, DO, didn't like being the associate residency director of the emergency medicine residency program at Philadelphia's Albert Einstein Medical Center. She did. Indeed, she had hoped to direct the program someday.

But with two young children at home, she was facing a dilemma all too common among female physicians: How best to balance career and family.

Managing a program of 44 residents while also performing clinical duties takes an extreme amount of time -- time she wasn't sure she wanted to devote to her career while her children were young.

The best solution, she decided, was to give up her administrative duties, but stay on at Einstein as a staff physician in the emergency department. Dr. Pierce scaled back her hours at Einstein in July 2004 and began working part time at Abington Emergency Physician Associates, P.C. in Abington, Pa.

In July 2005, she signed a full-time employment agreement at Abington and became an associate physician.

Now, slightly more than two years later, Dr. Pierce, 43, is back in Einstein Medical Center's ED. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has found that Abington discriminated against Dr. Pierce because she was female.

Dr. Pierce and the physician group are embroiled in contentious arbitration over the matter.

According to EEOC documents, Dr. Pierce's employment agreement with Abington stated that she would become eligible for shareholder status on July 1, 2007. Six months before an associate physician's eligibility date, shareholders vote on whether to elevate the associate to shareholder.