Female physicians experience greater earnings penalty
Female physicians experienced a greater earnings penalty because of less hours worked than men. Female physicians earned less per hour, despite being single, married or having children.
Marriage and children appeared to be associated with a greater earnings penalty among a cohort of female physicians because of less hours worked when compared with their male counterparts, according to study results published in JAMA Health Forum. Work is needed to address the barriers that lead women to work fewer hours compared with men to reduce the female-male earnings gap, researchers concluded. “A better understanding of the association between family structure and sex gaps in physician earnings and hours worked over the life cycle is needed to advance policies addressing persistent sex disparities,” Lucy Skinner, MPH, researcher in the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, and colleagues wrote.
“In contrast to the hours gap, our findings indicate that the gap in earnings per hour is not strongly associated with marriage and children, where female physicians earned between 21.4% and 23.9% less per hour than male physicians, regardless of whether they were single, married or had children,” the researchers wrote. “This difference in earnings per hour may be associated with women choosing to practice in lower paying specialties. Such decisions have been attributed to unconscious beliefs and overt sexist attitudes and behaviors during undergraduate and graduate medical education; benevolent sexism, where medical school advisers and mentors encourage women to enter more empathetic specialties; and hostile sexism, where medical students experience overt antipathy during their experiences with certain specialties on the basis of their sex.”...Read more
Can these pay gaps ever be abolished?
