Gender Gaps

Complementary to Lo Sasso et al., Esteves-Sorenson and Snyder (2012) display the unequal financial distribution between male and female physicians and show possible reasons for the inequality. Esteves-Sorenson and Snyder perform this by exploiting data from four rounds of the Community Tracking Study Physician Survey of 1997, 1998, 2001, and 2005, in which roughly 12,000 interviews were conducted per round (except in 2005 when only 6,000 interviews were conducted, with no explanation for the decrease). The survey inquired about the responding physicians’ earnings, hours and weeks worked, demographics, practice settings, specialty, and geographic location. Esteves-Sorensen and Snyder’s main focus was to dispute the results from another research project that claimed that there was

equality in starting physicians’ salaries. Through this successful process of refuting the other research project, Esteves-Sorensen and Snyder supply possible reasonings for the gap. Without adjusting for specialties, it was found that men physicians earned about 49 percent higher than women.

However, certain factors are noted that display a correlation for this gap such as the physicians’ specialty, that women tend to be employees, and that women are less likely to be part-owners of a group practice. Nevertheless, since these factors tend to arise in the debate of a gender gap in physician income, Esteves-Sorenson and Snyder reported that “within a given year, for men and women that work the same amount and in the same specialty, men still outearn women by 26%” (2012:40). Thus, even after creating an ideal situation in which there is a male and female physician who work the same amount of time and are in the same specialty, the female physician would still earn less than the male. To digress back to the issue of supporting or contradicting the other research project’s findings, Esteves-Sorenson and Snyder found contradictory evidence. Esteves-Sorenson and Snyder demonstrated this when they found that the young male physicians, who had fairly equal amounts of experience as their female counterparts, still “earned 13% more than their female counterparts”

(2012:40). Therefore, a major finding of this article is the correlation between the gender gap of physicians and the high prevalence of women physicians in certain specialties (pediatrics, psychiatry, and obstetrics/gynecology), women physicians as employees, and the lack of women physicians who are part-owners of a group practice. The other major finding, which contradicts another article’s finding, is that young physicians who do not have much experience, since they are young and newly graduated, do not have equality between the genders, but a gap in which male physicians earn more money. The contributions that this article makes to the literature of the subject is demonstrating the presence of a gender income gap and suggesting correlations for the gap, that others may want to pursue in research. Another contribution to the literature is the reaction to another research project, in which Esteves-Sorenson and Snyder challenge the other project’s results by providing their own that dispute and delegitimize the other project.