Women Physicians Face Extra Challenges: Salary gaps, first-name intros and pervasive bias are career hazards for female doctors.
U.S News & World Report
When hospital administrators insist on paying male physicians more money – even when female physicians have more experience, credentials and training – maybe it’s a reflex, like the knee-hammer test.
Time and time again, women physicians receive smaller salaries and lower signing bonuses than men, says Dr. Roberta Gebhard, president-elect of the American Medical Women’s Association and co-chair of AMWA’s gender equity task force.
In her task force role, Gebhard hears from women physicians, including full professors, who mentor male medical students only to learn they’re already earning much more straight out of their residency programs. She’s suffered from blatant pay inequities in her own career.
Pay gaps between newly trained male and female physicians aren’t only persisting – they’re growing, according to an analysis by the Center for Health Workforce Studies using data from the annual New York Resident Exit Survey.
On average, male physicians’ starting income was some $26,000 more than females’ in 2016. This gap was less than $10,000 in 2005, then up to nearly $12,000 by 2010. Gender wage gaps also showed up by specialty. Women dermatologists earned nearly $80,000 less, cardiologists earned about $64,000 less and emergency medicine physicians about $35,000 less than their early-career male counterparts.