The gender pay gap in the United States (US) has narrowed over the last several decades, with the female/male earnings ratio in the US increased from about 60% before the 1980s to about 79% by 2014. However, the gender pay gap among the healthcare workforce persists. The objective of this study is to estimate the gender pay gap in the US federal governmental public health workforce during 2010-2018.
We used an administrative dataset including annual pay rates and job characteristics of employees of the US Department of Health and Human Services. Employees\' gender was classified based on first names. Regression analyses were used to estimate the gender pay gap using the predicted gender.
Female employees of the DHHS earned about 13% less than men in 2010, and 9.2% less in 2018. Occupation, pay plan, and location explained more than half of the gender pay gap. Controlling for job grade further reduces the gap. The unexplained portion of the gender pay gap in 2018 was between 1.0 and 3.5%. Female employees had a slight advantage in terms of pay increase over the study period.
While the gender pay gap has narrowed within the last two decades, the pay gap between female and male employees in the federal governmental public health workforce persists and warrants continuing attention and research. Continued efforts should be implemented to reduce the gender pay gap among the health workforce.

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The impact of the next influenza pandemic may be mitigated by inducing immunity in individuals prior to the start of national epidemics using a pre-pandemic vaccine targeted against current avian influenza strains. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) intends that pre-pandemic vaccines will be allocated to states in proportion to the size of their population in predefined priority groups, i.e. approximately pro-rata. We show that such an equitable policy is likely to be the least efficient in terms of the number of infections averted. We demonstrate that the potential benefits could be substantial if a fully discretionary policy is allowed, i.e. if some regions are allocated sufficient vaccines to achieve herd immunity while other regions are allocated no vaccine. Since such an inequitable policy may be impractical, we consider the sensitivity of an intermediate policy (in which 50% of the stockpile is allocated on a pro-rata basis) to key transmission uncertainties. The benefits of the 50% discretionary policy are sensitive to parameter values which cannot be known in advance. Therefore, despite substantial potential benefits of non-pro-rata policies, our results suggest that the current HHS policy of pro-rata allocation by state is a good compromise in terms of simplicity, robustness, equity and efficiency.