Peruvian pharmacist employment and wage: gender, university and type of job influences

Abstract

Wage is a key element for the performance of the health professional. Because of that, an observational study was carried out based on the secondary analysis of the main results from the "National Survey of University Graduates and Universities (NSUGU), 2014" to identify the conditioning factors of inequality in accessing to the labor market and low wage of Peruvian pharmacists. Chi square, crude Odds Ratio (cOR) and adjusted Odds Ratio (aOR) with 95% confidence interval were calculated. In the bivariate analysis the work not related to pharmaceutical training exposed pharmacists to almost four and a half times the risk of a remuneration lower than 1000 PEN compared to those who had a job related to their professional training (cOR=4.473) and it increased to six times in the multivariate analysis (cOR=5.938). Women were less likely to have this remuneration than men (cOR = 0.544) and maintained this characteristic in the multivariate analysis. The graduation from a public university was a protective factor of remuneration lower than 1000 PEN in the multivariate analysis, but not in the bivariate analysis. Women and graduates from public universities are more likely to be unemployed, while exposure to low income is measured by occupation not related to professional training.