Does Gender Income Inequality exist in Healthcare?

Are you being compensated well, fairly, and commensurate with your capabilities?

I’ll preface this post with the obvious and the less apparent facts. The obvious, I’m a male. A minority male. Someone who has never lived or walked in a woman’s shoes, although I have worked alongside many women over my career, I attempt to address this important topic from the articles I have read and not from any personal experience. The less apparent facts. I have been an adjunct clinical professor for ten years, and through that time have been witness to many graduating classes of physiotherapy students. This has given me a unique insight into the next generation of physiotherapists, and in my case, it is largely comprised of females.

The next few paragraphs will bring to light the discrepancies women face in healthcare. I will attempt to illuminate the chasm between males and females not only in income in general but also how it changes throughout their respective careers, whether there is a parental and ethnic impact. Writing this article is something clearly out of my comfort zone, however, I’m glad I did, as it taught me a lot about the current economic state of healthcare and what my female colleagues have endured.

“Healthcare Is a Women’s Work” 1

Regardless of how it is calculated, health care is women’s work. Four out of five paid workers in health care are women. Nurses constitute the single largest occupational category in health care, accounting for over 30% of those Statistics Canada counts as part of the health sector, and over 60% of health professionals. Meanwhile, according to 2006 Census data, 93.8% of nurses are women. Women are still a minority of practicing doctors. In 2006, 35.5% of physicians, dentists, and veterinarians were women.  The overwhelming majority of technicians and therapists are women and their proportions are increasing in most of them.

Statistics Canada includes some support personnel within the “health occupations” category. Among these workers classified as “assisting occupations in support of health services” women dominate. 88% are female. This category includes dental assistants care aides, orderlies, and personal assistants and concentrations of women are very high in all of these occupations.  Indeed, these jobs are more female-dominated than professional occupations in health. 1

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of physiotherapists are female.

Do male physicians get paid more than their female counterparts?

Undoubtedly yes. This was evident in 2012, where the average male MD in primacy care made $174 000 USD compared to $ 141 000USD, a difference of $33 000USD. Fast forward four years and they EXACT same difference persists, $33 000USD.

The gap was even wider for specialities. In 2012, the difference between was $69 000USD in favour of males. That is more than the yearly salary of the average american! Four years later, the gap widened. In 2016, the difference was $82 000.

Now I really don’t have any insight if there are more factors at play in this chart than sex alone. As an outsider just viewing this at face value, it’s quite shocking.

If you’re a man with children, do you make more than a woman with a child?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yes you do. A man with a child has a median income of $1229 USD a week. Compare that to a man without a child, $ 1005. What is even more shocking is that a woman with a child expects to earn $909. A difference $303 USD a week. Extrapolate that to 52 weeks a year and that’s $16 640 USD.

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Your ethnicity will impact how much you’ll earn.

Black and Hispanic women are most affected by the wage gap when compared to non-Hispanic white men. Based on 2020 data, Black women made just around 64% of what non-Hispanic white men made. As tracked by the Census Bureau, Hispanic women could be of any race, and their pay gap between non-Hispanic white men is even wider than that of Black women. 

"In 2020, the median annual pay for an Asian American woman who still held a full-time, year-round job was $68,442, compared to $67,629 for a white-non-Hispanic man," the National Partnership for Women and Families wrote in the fact sheet.

The larger disparity between non-Hispanic white men's and women of color's earnings could be attributed to the fact that "women of color suffer both because of their gender and their race," according to an April 2016 report released by the Senate Joint Economic Committee Democratic Staff. 3

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Over the last 22 years, as women age, they earn less relative to their male counterparts

The gap in aggregate pay between women and men in the U.S. narrowed from 65 cents for each dollar earned by men in 1982, to 80 cents to the dollar in 2002. Yet, this progress has stalled in the 21st century, with the gap narrowing to only two cents in the past two decades

Pew Research finds that women typically begin their careers "closer to wage parity with men, but lose ground as they age and progress through their work lives." The researchers attribute this partly to parenthood. 4

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Income gap between men and women diverge then converge through their lifetime

Men, over the course of their careers and lifetime, historically have earned more than their female counterparts. Earlier in their career, the difference is relatively small (when compared to later on). However, in their 30s (presumably for a few reasons, one being childbirth and the traditional role of the mother being the primary caregiver and therefore being absent from the workforce for a period of time) the gap widens. Men’s wages accelerate. That spread maintains through the mid and late stages of the careers of men and women, until retirement. After retirement (presuming 65 years old), men’s income tends to decrease at a faster rate than women's.

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40 years later, women have taken the lead in holding at least a Bachelor’s Degree

They also note that parenthood affects the hourly earnings of employed women and men in unexpected ways. For example, while employed mothers typically earn less than their female peers with no children, that gap is driven primarily by differences in educational attainment.

 Comparing women with similar levels of education reveals that there's little gap between earnings for working mothers and non-mothers. And women with higher levels of education tend to have fewer or no children at home. 

 We also know that motherhood impacts women's potential earnings, as career breaks cause varying degrees of income sacrifices, while some women choose never to re-enter the paid workforce.

 It's difficult to know what a mother's earnings might have been, but estimates suggest that motherhood may account for most of the current shortfall in the overall earnings potential of women in the Western world.

 Despite gains in education in recent years, with 48% of women holding a bachelor's degree or higher in 2022 compared to 41% for men, the rate at which the pay gap closes has slowed 4

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I hope that this article has done for you what it has done for me, illustrating the fact that there is a huge gender income gap in not only healthcare but also the workplace as a whole. For those entering the workforce or those switching roles and are looking for assistance in negotiating salaries (something I’ve done plenty of times over my career), consider booking a 30 min call with me, so I can share some strategies to ensure you get compensated commensurate with your abilities.