Male doctors take the lion's share when it comes to Medicare reimbursements, earning a whopping 88 percent more than female doctors, a new study find.
It's no secret that gender influences a person's income in a big way. In an era where people emphasize greatly on gender equality, salaries and monthly earnings continue to highlight the gender pay gap that affects all industries, especially medical workers. To gain a better understanding of this phenomenon, officials from NerdWallet Health conducted a study on employees from Medicare - the United State's largest medical insurer.
They found that while men and women doctors are paid equally by the insurance company, male physicians tend to earn 88 percent more than their female counterparts, owing to several other contributing factors. Ballpark figures reveal that male doctors working at Medicare are paid $118,782 per year while women are paid $63,346.
One of the reasons behind this is because male physicians are allotted more patients than female doctors. While a male doctor at Medicare attends to 513 patients a year, a female doctor is allotted 320 patients, leading to men making 24 percent more money per patient. The study also revealed that male doctors perform more services per patient, further increasing their income. On an average, male doctors bill Medicare patients for 5.7 services per patient compared to 4.7 services per patient by female doctors. This holds true for doctors across all specialties.
The study highlights how medicine is practiced inconsistently across the country. Researchers said that this happens despite no difference in service quality offers by both genders. The findings only add to a previous study which showed that women earn on average 77 cents for every dollar that their male counterparts earn, and this gap widens for women of color.
A prior study also found that males tend to earn more monthly income because they work longer hours than women. Also, male physicians dominate high-paying surgical fields driving women to earn 10 percent lesser than men from surgical specialties like cardiac, orthopedic, and neurosurgery.
A blog post highlighted that women tend to outnumber males in global university attendance and graduation rates. However, despite having a higher education, women get paid far lesser than males across all industries. Market experts speculate that the scarcity coupled with the demand for highly educated men make them a bigger acquisition, leading to higher pay.
In 1982, TIME published an interesting article titled "How Long Till Equality?" Since then, more women are working now than ever before, more women in politics, more are teaching and learning. Despite this, no one can say that the gender gap has been eliminated one hundred percent.
The current study by NerdWallet Health clarified that there are other important factors that may impact this gender pay gap, including geographical location, coding variations, health care settings and other data that were missing in the study due to privacy policies.
