More women than men are enrolling in medical school, but women doctors are still paid significantly less than their male colleagues, according to a new national survey released Wednesday. And the pay gap is growing.
In Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts (identified as the Providence Metro Area) women physicians earned, on average, about $109,000 less in 2017 than their male colleagues. That’s a gender pay gap in of about 31 percent. The national average gender pay gap was 27.7 percent.
Rhode Island was one of 25 metro areas surveyed where the gender pay gap was more than $100,000.
“What surprised us the most is that we could not find a specialty or location where this gap did not exist,’’ Dr. Amit Phull, of Doximity, a San Francisco-based social networking service that conducted the survey. “So there were variations in the size of the gap, certainly, but the gap was very significant at least in my view, and it existed everywhere.”
- Durham, NC — $225,486
- Charleston, SC — $226,188
- Ann Arbor, MI — $232,638
- New Haven, CT — $233,700
- Providence, RI — $245,986
- Baltimore, MD — $247,147
- Denver, CO — $252,077
- Washington, DC — $252,217
- Cincinnati, OH — $255,590
- Nashville, TN — $256,319
The widening gap comes as more women than men enrolled in U.S. medical schools for the first time in 2017.
Women physicians’ salaries lagged even farther behind their male peers in medical specialties where the overall salaries were higher, the survey found, belying the notion that women doctors earn less because they tend to work in lower-paying specialties. “It cuts across all specialties,” Phull said.
The Providence metro area had the fifth-lowest average salary for female physicians — $245,986 — after New Haven, CT. Providence also tied with Riverside, CA for the fourth-largest gender wage gap, at 31 percent.
The gender pay gap in the Providence metro area also grew last year by 6 percent compared with 2016.
Boston and other the large metro areas with some of the country’s most prestigious medical schools, the study found, tended to have lower compensation for doctors overall. Phull said that might be partly a function of supply and demand, since areas without prestigious medical schools might have to pay more to attract doctors, who tend to practice close to where they did their training.
Physician salaries overall are significantly higher than the statewide median household income, which in Rhode Island is under $59,000 a year, according to state labor data.
But physicians also typically begin their careers carrying a lot of medical school debt, Phull said, at a time in their lives when they may already have families to support.
The survey included 65,000 licensed physicians in 50 metropolitan areas. The Providence metro area includes all of Rhode Island, except for Westerly, as well as New Bedford, Fall River, Taunton, Somerset and Attleboro, Massachusetts.
