The researchers found that among 11,490 nonsurgical specialists, the absolute adjusted difference in annual income between men and women was $36,604 for practices with less than 50 percent male physicians compared with $91,669 for practices with at least 90 percent male physicians.
They found a similar distribution of incomes among 3,483 surgical specialists, with absolute adjusted gender differences of $46,503 in annual income for practices with less than 50 percent male physicians compared with $149,460 for practices with at least 90 percent male physicians. The relative difference in pay for surgical specialists was 10 percent in the practices with the most women compared to 27 percent in practices with more than 90 percent men.
Incomes were not affected by gender representation among primary care practitioners. Among the 3,829 primary care physicians in the sample, differences in income for men and women did not vary according to the proportion of male physicians in a practice. The researchers said that this was likely because there is less variation in income among primary care physicians. Primary care is among the specialties with the highest proportion of female physicians.
The researchers said that one likely explanation for greater equity in practices with more women was that the experience of working with women might change some of the implicit and explicit biases that many people hold about women in the workplace. They also said that women who were hired by practices with more female physicians might face less difficulty negotiating parameters such as how long they are allowed to spend with each patient, how long it will take to become a partner and other factors that impact earnings over the long term.
"For a woman negotiating the initial terms of her employment with a new practice, there might be a real difference if you're sitting at the table with five men compared to if there are three men and two women," said Christopher Whaley, the study's lead author and policy researcher at the Rand Corporation.
Whaley said that the wage gap would fall by about 20 percent if practices had more equal gender representation.
"Our findings suggest that increasing the gender diversity of specialty practices would do a lot to close the pay gap between men and women in medicine," Whaley said. "Yet another reason to push for greater diversity."
This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Office of the Director, (grant 1DP5OD017897), the National Institutes on Aging (grant 1K01AG061274) and the Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare.
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