Why are female physicians paid less?
In a new study published in JAMA, my colleagues and I found that even after accounting for productivity, women working as physician researchers at American Medical Schools are paid $13,000 less per year than their male colleagues, a difference that amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of their careers.
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Medical experts have long noticed gender disparities in physician pay. Traditionally male fields like neurosurgery pay substantially more than fields preferred by more women, such as general pediatrics. If women are voluntarily choosing lower paying fields—perhaps for lifestyle reasons or maybe because they don’t value money as much as men do—then it’s arguable that we should not fret over pay disparities. It’s America, after all, where people have the right to choose.
In our new study however, led by Reshma Jagsi a colleague of mine at the University of Michigan, we found disparities even after accounting for the different career choices and trajectories of male and female physicians. We focused our research on mid-career physicians who had chosen to pursue primarily research careers. All of the people we surveyed were physicians who had received training grants from the National Institutes of Health (the NIH) to pursue research careers. These NIH grants (called K awards) are extremely competitive, meaning we were surveying the best of the best. It also means we were surveying people who would largely be paid according to their research accomplishments, not according to their clinical work productivity.
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What about productivity, you ask? Did the men work harder? Accomplish more? Well, we asked these physicians about their publication success and about their ability obtaining additional research grants; we asked them whether they had been promoted or had taken on any kind of leadership role at their medical school; we even asked them how many hours per week they worked. In other words, we did our best to measure the kinds of things that ought to influence how much a boss pays an employee.
Link to editorial: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2012/06/female-physicians-paid.html
Link to full text JAMA study: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=1182859
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What's interesting to me is that its the best study I know of (in any field) to control for factors like professional achievement, sub-specialization, and other criteria which are often left out. The one number I'd like to see though is if the majority of the difference is made up of surgical specialties, or primary care / hospital medicine. Surgical specialties still tend to be dominated by men -- especially the higher paying ones -- and maybe skewing the results. Still, this is an impressive study worth reading.
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doctors move around.
so that must be it.... 
Probably a pretty futile K and R....
