Woman doctors earn an average of $56,000 less each year than their male counterparts, according to a study released Tuesday. The gap hasn't budged this much since the late 1980s.
The study, which was published in the JAMA Internal Medicine, used a nationally-representative survey conducted in 1987 through 2010 and found that although earning gaps decreased over time among non-healthcare workers, that was not the case for doctors and certain healthcare professionals.
"There is something that is intrinsically going on within the physician workforce," said Dr. Anupam B. Jena, the study's senior author from Harvard Medical School's Department of Health Care Policy. "We would have suspected that the gender gap between males and females would have converged somewhat over the years, and what we found was that it was relatively constant."
Jena and his colleagues compared survey answers about income and other aspects of work from close to 6,300 doctors and 32,000 other healthcare workers. Taking into account hours worked and years of experience - but not specialty - they found the average male doctor earned about $221,000 in 2006 to 2010, and the average female doctor earned $165,000.
This represented about 25 percent difference in salary, similar to the 20 percent disparity Jena and his colleagues found among doctors surveyed between 1987 and 1990. They reported that income gaps held steady at about a 40 percent difference in pay among male and female dentists. Disparities fell slightly over time to about 11 percent for pharmacists and 6 percent for registered nurses.
During the same time period, they found salary differences between men and women outside of healthcare dropped from 28 percent between 1987 and 1990 to 15 percent between 2006 and 2010. Their findings echo another recent study that showed female doctor-researchers make less money than males.
