Female physicians experience greater earnings penalty due in part to marriage, children
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Key takeaways:
- 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 associated with a greater earnings penalty among 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.
Persistent disparities
“Our work was prompted by studies that looked at the earnings loss for female lawyers and MBAs following the choice to get married and have children. Previous studies have shown that female physicians earn less than their male counterparts, so we wanted to investigate the impacts of marriage and children on the gap in female physician earnings to see if the patterns were similar to female lawyers and MBAs throughout their careers,” Lucy E. Skinner, MPH, researcher in the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth told Healio. “This is an important matter to address as more than half of medical school students are women. There are more women in the workforce as the older generation of physicians retire.”
The retrospective, cross-sectional study included 95,435 physicians (mean age, 44.4 years; 64.2% men; 67.3% white) who responded to the American Community Survey between 2005 and 2019.
Researchers assessed gaps in earnings and hours according to sex by calculating family status and physician age. Main outcomes included annual earned income, usual hours worked per week and earnings per hour worked.
Persistent disparities
Results showed that female physicians appeared more likely to be single (18.8% vs. 11.2%) and less likely to have children (53.3% vs. 58.2%) when compared with their male counterparts.
Researchers observed a female-male earnings gap among those aged 25 years to 64 years of approximately $1.6 million for single physicians, $2.5 million for married physicians without children and $3.1 million for physicians with children. Male physicians earned between 21.4% and 23.9% more per hour than female physicians.
Moreover, results showed a female-male gap in hours worked of 0.6% for single physicians, 7% for married physicians without children and 17.5% for physicians with children.
“These findings did not surprise me,” Skinner said. “As a woman in medicine, I have encountered the way that structural sexism operates within the medical education system. Women are encouraged to pursue ‘family-friendly’ specialties and discouraged from higher-paying specialties with longer and more rigorous training. However, I was surprised by the magnitude of disparity in earnings. On average, female physicians with children earn more than $3 million less than their male counterparts throughout their careers.”
Address earnings gaps
It is important for health care employers and hospital systems to address the sex-based earnings gaps within their institutions, Skinner told Healio.
“It is also important to acknowledge the role of structural sexism and gender norms in the medical system, and to consider initiatives to support both female and male physicians in child care tasks,” she said. “Expanding day care access on site and ensuring sufficient and equal maternity and paternity leave would help support physicians who choose to have children to pursue their desired work schedules and reduce the burden of childrearing that disproportionately falls on women.”
For more information:
Lucy E. Skinner, MPH, can be reached at lucy.e.skinner.med@dartmouth.edu.
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