A new study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine found significant differences in salary exist at 24 US public medical schools.
Advertisement
The average pay gap between female and male orthopedic surgeons was almost $41,000. For a likely explanation, that leaves plain old bias.
At U.S. medical schools affiliated with public universities, female physicians get paid tens of thousands of dollars less each year than their male colleagues, according to a new study.
One of the biggest differences was found in professors.
The findings were published online in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday.
The report showed records from more than 10,000 academic doctors to demonstrate how universal the gender inequality issue truly is.
The study included 10,241 physician faculty members, of whom 3,549 (34.7 percent) were women and 6,692 (65.3 percent) were men, a proportion comparable to that seen among other USA medical schools not included in 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”, says Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, of the MGH Department of Medicine and the HMS Department of Health Care Policy, who led the study.
After adjusting for a variety of factors, the researchers found that female neurosurgeons, cardiothoracic surgeons, and women in other surgical subspecialities made roughly $44,000 less than comparable men in those fields. It turns out that women are more likely to be in internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, and pediatrics. He is now looking at
whether there are differences among male and female cardiologists – a field that has experienced its own shortage.
Of course, there were other differences, such as in pay between the 24 universities themselves, as well as between the various medical specialties.
“What policies, procedures, leadership, or culture at these sites helps to counteract a gender pay gap?” she wrote, suggesting that these methods could help solve the pay gap nationwide. CNN reported that women won’t earn equal pay until 2059, according to the institute.
Jena also found that female physicians were less likely than their male counterparts to be full professors.
Co-author Daniel Blumenthal, MD, MBA, of the MGH Division of Cardiology, adds, “Our findings also highlight how non-traditional data sets like Doximity and public employee salary information can be used to investigate questions that historically have been hard to evaluate due to lack of access to large-scale data”.
Advertisement
The study first collected data from over 10,000 faculty physicians across 24 USA medical schools.
