The Female Physician Wage Gap

Unequal pay is everywhere — and a new study finds even doctors are susceptible.

“Among physicians with faculty appointments at 24 U.S. public medical schools, significant sex differences in salary exist even after accounting for age, experience, specialty, faculty rank, and measures of research productivity and clinical revenue,” researchers from Mass General Hospital (MGH) in Boston and Harvard Medical School (HMS) stated in their findings.

“The fact that we observed these income differences among physicians who are public employees raises issues that may have state regulatory implications,” said one of the study’s authors.

The study results, just published in JAMA, show the salary disparity without any adjustments. Male academic professors made, on average, $257,957 annually compared to their female counterparts at $206,641 — a very high discrepancy of $51,315, or a difference of 20 percent.

With the adjustments, the disparity is still 8 percent. Researchers controlled for potential confounding factors such as field specialties, years of experience, total publications, clinical trial participation, and Medicare payments — which tended to all be associated with increased pay, according to the study.

“More than raising attention to salary sex differences in medicine, our findings highlight the fact that these differences persist even when we account for detailed factors that influence income and reflect academic productivity,” said lead author Dr. Anupam Jena in a release.

One of the major findings was that an adjusted salary of a female full professor matched up with the salary of a male associate professor. The research was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Two of the more prominent universities in the study included the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and the University of California San Francisco, according to The Washington Post. Overall, researchers studied the salaries of 10,241 physicians from 24 public medical schools in 12 states. The team was able to compare earnings, as the Freedom of Information Law requires public medical schools to release salary information.

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The findings are generally in line with the existing pay gap between genders in society in general. As of 2015, full-time female workers made approximately 79 cents to every dollar that a man received, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research — a wage gap of 21 percent. The disparity in pay is consistent across almost every occupation where data has been calculated, according to the IWPR’s annual fact sheet.

It is likely these findings apply to physicians without academic status, as well as physicians in private academic environments.

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“The fact that we observed these income differences among physicians who are public employees raises issues that may have state regulatory implications,” Dr. Jena told the Boston Business Journal.

With these larger implications and the growing presence of women in the medical field, it is likely the findings are going to strike a chord with women physicians. As of October 2015, women made up approximately one-third of all practicing physicians, as well as 60 percent of pediatricians and 51 percent of all obstetricians and gynecologists, according to The Wall Street Journal.