While the existence of the wage gap remains a raging debate, a new study out of Harvard Medical School has something to add in terms of a specific career—namely, that female doctors are paid almost $20,000 per year less than their male counterparts, after taking into consideration years of experience, specialty, faculty rank, research productivity, clinical revenue, and age.
The data came from 10,241 academic physicians across 24 public medical schools across 12 states, who are mandated to release the salary information of such employees. Of this group, 3,549 were female; their unadjusted salary difference was a whopping $51,315 per year. After taking into consideration the aforementioned variables—as female doctors tend to be younger, are less likely to be full professors, and have fewer scientific publications that men—the difference dropped to $19,878 per year.
Massive losses in the long-term
This may seem like an insignificant sum to some, but in fact it ends up being nearly $700,000 less across an entire 35-year career as compared to their male counterparts.
“Although we were not surprised by the findings of our study, they are nonetheless deeply concerning,” Anupam B. Jena, first author of the research published in JAMA Internal Medicine, told The Guardian.
“The fact that men and women in academic medicine who perform similar work are paid different amounts not only has implications for equity but for efficiency; i.e. how can we expect to continue to attract the most talented women into the field if we don’t fix this issue?”
One of the biggest differences was found in professors. The adjusted salary of female full professors was $250,971; this is comparable to the salary of male associate professors ($247,212). Associate professors, incidentally, are an entire level below full professors in rank.
Of course, there were other differences, such as in pay between the 24 universities themselves, as well as between the various medical specialties. Female orthopedic surgeons earn nearly $41,000 less than male ones, while internal medicine only had a difference of $16,159.
“It suggests that there is something not just at the institutional level that could be driving these gaps, but there may be something more systematic about the types of doctors who are in certain specialists and the cultures in those specialties,” said Jena.
Of course, the study does not reveal what is causing this enormous difference, but Jena believes research such as his can help fix it. “Because we used data that was publicly available, it really highlights the idea that transparency could play a transformative role in dealing with this issue,” he said.
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