A reader sent me a link (thanks!) to this article on the pay gap betweeen male and female doctors and after doing a study, the authors reached the following conclusion:
Male doctor earns more per hour relative to the male PA than the female doctor earns relative to the female PA. However, a big part of the difference comes from an hours gap. The vast majority of male doctors under the age of 55 work substantially more than the standard 40 hour work week. In contrast, most female doctors work between 2 to 10 hours fewer than this per week.
It’s hard to compare wages when one group (men) are working more than 40 hours a week and another group (women) are working 2-10 hours less than 40 hours per week. Warren Farrell has been making this point for years.
Why is this so hard for feminists to understand, unless they want something for nothing? Oh, never mind.
Yeah, the whiners. Sounds like they need a wife to me.
http://www.medicalspouse.com/forums/showthread.php?31522-Why-I-Want-A-Wife
The article makes no sense.
Doctors are not homogenous in income. A top producing neurosurgeon is far higher in income than an office based pediatrician. That is not to say that they should be the same and it has nothing to do with whom contributes more effort or what the ethical practice of medicine entails. The family practice doc is just as respected as the sub specialist in my book, they have just chosen different trade offs. How much call, do you want less hospital vs office practice, what hours or patient load do you want? Money is one of those trade offs but someone who loves emergency medicine would be miserable and useless as an ortho surgeon whatever the income.
The medical community is the most egalitarian of anything I know. It is one of the most result based things on earth. Nobody cares if it was a gay Pakistani Muslim who treated your back pain if you get resolution of your disease.
So women tend more to primary care but also some other higher income fields like Radiology, OB/GYN, Dermotology, Pathology, or General Surgery. The comparison to PAs is a false correlation here.
So nothing here but no scientific analysis on no real issue from an MSM article. Again.
You didn’t read the article, did you? The study specifically only looked at primary care physicians, for the exact reasons you whined about. See, primary care physicians can just hold normal office hours, so their “number of hours worked” is completely up to them for the most part. And males tend to work more hours than women so they get paid more.
Excuse me for asking an indiscrete question? Did you take maths at kindergrtaen? Had you done so you would know about the math concept of “average”.
My degree is in mathematics.
Why do they insist on comparing groups of people rather than individuals anyway. Every person/ situation is unique. Averages don’t really mean anything. Also, they really need to stop lumping childless and child rearing women into the same statistics. Two completely different worlds, the only thing in common is two X chromosomes, otherwise we might as well be from different planets. Totally different priorities and demands on our time and energy. I would make a strong guess that childless women probably make more than anybody including childless males.
Just because you don’t understand statistics, it doesn’t mean that “averages don’t really mean anything”. I blame your parents for not making you take math more seriously.
completely off-topic- but- jeannette, which saint? for pregnancy and delivery?
and it depends! the female doctors I know? their moms buy their clothes b/c they are so busy- between clinic and emergency room. or clinic and small children. or clinic and missionary work.
the guys? clinic and gov’t boards. clinic and missionary work. clinic and third world clinic.
personally, if their insurance rates were reasonable, this wouldn’t even be a discussion: they could all hire butlers and maids.
Math has nothing to do with what the average means. If I make $0 as a stay at home mom and Cathy Career makes $100k per year, we have an average salary of $50k per year. If Blue Collar Bob makes $20k per year and Wallstreet Wally makes $100k per year they have an average salary of $60 k per year. So what does it mean. Does it mean that men are better off than women? That is the kind of thinking that is common these days. But actually Bob is much poorer than Cathy, and he doesn’t even know Wally, so the average really doesn’t mean anything. The reality that Bob knows is trying to make it on $20k per year, not that men on average make $60k per year.
Doctors get paid piece-work, like sweatshop workers in China. The more hours you work, the more shirts you stitch or the more patients you see. The more shirts you make or patients you see, the more money you earn.
If Chinese peasants can figure out how this works, why can’t Americans?
Men also make more money because they are better able to handle the stresses of the high stakes fields, like neurosurgery or heart surgery where one error in judgment can kill or have lifelong, devastating effects on a patient.
Not many women can get past an error that kills a child or a mother. Men are far more likely to be able to put the episode in a lockbox in their mind and move on. And that’s what it takes to survive in these high paying specialties
Just from what I have observed, I would have to disagree, Lennie. While the female docs I have seen tend to express emotions slightly more than the males, they are both just as likely tobe cut to the core by tragedy, and to move on. Of course, I mostly only work in the Emergency Room, so it might be different in the specialty areas.
As far as pay differentials, doctors who work more generally get paid more, as it should be. If a study is done just on that factor, I wouldn’t be surprised if it showed a pretty direct correlation, maybe affected more by what school someone graduated from than gender.