By Genevra Pittman
NEW YORK, June 12 (Reuters Health) – U.S. female
doctor-researchers make an average of $12,000 a year less than
their male counterparts, even after their work hours and area of
specialty are taken into account, according to a study released
on Tuesday.
Doctor-researchers have both medical degrees and PhDs, and
they see patients as well as conduct medical studies.
The wage gap between men and women is nothing new, but among
doctors in particular it wasn’t clear if the disparity was due
to different career choices and work habits in men and women
that could have affected their pay.
“Disturbingly, even after we controlled for all those other
factors, we found that male doctors were paid more than female
doctors for doing the same work,” said Dr. Reshma Jagsi, the
lead author of the new study from the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor. The findings were published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association http://bit.ly/JjFzqx.
Jagsi and her colleagues sent questionnaires to 800
doctor-researchers in the United States, all of whom had
previously won a mid-career grant award from the government. The
doctors were an average of 45 years old at the time of the
survey and three-quarters of them were white.
Men reported making an average of slightly over $200,000 per
year and women about $168,000.
The researchers found women were more likely to work in
lower-paying specialties such as pediatrics and family medicine.
Female doctors also tended to work slightly fewer hours than
their male peers — 58 hours per week, on average, versus 63 for
men.
Those differences were responsible for some of the salary
gap. But even after Jagsi’s team accounted for income
disparities that could have been due to career and life choices,
the researchers found women still made about $12,000 less than
men doing the same type and amount of work.
CONSCIOUS TRADE-OFFS, OR BIAS?
That’s similar to what has been found in past research, such
as in studies of early-career doctors, according to Anthony Lo
Sasso, a health policy and economics researcher from the
University of Illinois at Chicago.
But the finding still leaves many unanswered questions, said
Lo Sasso, who wasn’t involved in the new research.
“It really doesn’t get at what the underlying driver is, and
I think that remains the puzzle at this point — what is
accounting for this unexplained salary difference?”
One explanation, according to the researchers, is that women
are less aggressive about negotiating for pay or may take
factors other than salary, such as location and community, into
account when choosing a job.
Lo Sasso said it’s possible women in the study accepted
slightly lower pay in return for less time being on-call and
more predictability in their schedules. Those types of questions
were not included in the survey.
The researchers calculated that over her career, the average
female doctor-researcher would make about $350,000 less than a
man doing similar work because of unexplained salary
differences.
Jagsi said she worries the findings may hint at unconscious
biases in hiring and pay at the academic institutions where
these researchers worked. One way to address that, she said, is
for employers to have clear policies about how salaries are
determined so doctors can know if they’re being paid fairly.
That applies outside of hospitals and universities as well,
she said. A report released in April showed American women make
77 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gap that is even
bigger in certain professions, such as financial management.
(Editing by Frederik Joelving and Michele Gershberg; Desking by
Cynthia Osterman)
