Female Doctors Earn Less Than Male Counterparts: Study

TUESDAY, June 12 (HealthDay News) — Male doctors in the United
States make an average of $12,000 more per year than female doctors, a new
study finds.

Researchers surveyed 800 doctors in the middle of their careers and
found that the annual salary was about $200,00 for men and $168,000 for
women, a difference of about $32,000.

When the researchers factored in medical specialty, male doctors made
nearly $18,000 more. When the researchers adjusted for a range of factors,
including work hours and productivity, they found that male doctors made
$12,000 more.

During a 30-year career, a female doctor would make about $360,000 less
than a similar male doctor, according to the researchers from the
University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor and Duke University in
Durham, N.C.

The study will appear June 13 in the Journal of the American Medical
Association
.

The study participants had received a highly competitive early-career
research grant from the National Institutes of Health between 2000 and
2003. The researchers focused on these doctors in order to have an
extremely select, highly motivated and talented group of doctors involved
in academic medicine.

“The gender pay disparity we found in this highly talented and select
group of physicians was sobering,” lead study author Dr. Reshma Jagsi, an
associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan
Medical School, said in a university news release.

“To see that men and women doing similar work are paid quite
differently in this cream-of-the-crop sample is both surprising and
disturbing,” Jagsi added. “I hope these findings will help inform policy
discussions on how to address these disparities and ensure equal pay for
men and women who are performing equal work.”

Conscious discrimination may not be the reason for this gender pay gap,
said study senior author Dr. Peter Ubel, a professor at Duke University’s
Fuqua School of Business and Sanford School of Public Policy.

“For all we know, women are paid less in part because they don’t
negotiate as assertively as men, or because their spouse’s jobs make it
harder for them to entertain competing job offers,” Ubel said in the news
release.

“Nevertheless, whatever the reason for the salary disparity, academic
medical centers should work to pay more fairly,” he said. “A person’s
salary should not depend upon whether they have a Y chromosome.”

More information

The U.S. Department of Labor has more about physicians and surgeons.

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