Women in America earn just $100,000 less than men in their careers as doctors.
If the gender gap in America is closing, it’s nowhere near as wide as the one in the medical world.
Women earned $700,000 less in their careers as physicians than men in 2015, and they’ll still be making a $2 million difference when they retire, according to a new analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by Bloomberg.
“The rate of increase in doctor salaries tends to slow when the share of women in the workforce outpaces male growth,” the study said.
From 2009 to 2015, roughly 34 percent of Americans worked in jobs that were in which they were the only woman, and roughly 43 percent of those jobs were physicians and dentists.
The average salary for males in these jobs was roughly $378,000, while for females it was $299,000. That means that a male doctor makes $2 million less than his female counterpart, on average.
A small number of high-earning physicians and dentists likely contributed to the report’s findings, said Ariadne Y. Armour, a senior health policy analyst at Bloomberg who authored the report. However, if other professions in the country had been roughly equal between men and women in average earnings, “you’d expect female doctors to earn $2 million more than their male counterparts,” she said.