On September 28, 2022, JAMA Surgery published an article, “Assessment of Medical Industry Compensation to US Physicians by Gender.” The authors of the study found that using their population-based cross-sectional study of 1050 payments made by the medical industry from 2013 to 2019, only 3.1% of the highest earners were women and that men received a significantly higher median total payment than women did.
In conducting the study, the authors pulled data from the Open Payments database for the five female and five male physicians who received the most financial compensation from each of the fifteen highest-grossing medical supply companies in the United States from January 2013 to January 2019.
The companies selected for the analysis were Abbott Laboratories; Baxter International Inc.; Becton, Dickinson and Company; Boston Scientific Corporation; Cardinal Health Inc.; Edwards Life Sciences Corporation; Fresenius Medical Care AG & Company KGaA; Medtronic PLC; Novartis International AG; Olympus Corporation; Siemens Healthineers AG; Smith & Nephew PLC; Stryker Corporation; Terumo Corporation; and Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc.
Among the 1050 payments reviewed, 1017 (96.9%) of the five highest earners were men and only 33 (3.1%) were women. Over the study period, female physicians were paid a mean of $41,320 while male physicians were paid a mean of $1,226,377. From 2013 to 2019, the payment gap between female and male physicians increased from $54,343 to $166,778.
While male physicians received higher median payments across all specialties, orthopedic surgery had the largest gap, with male physicians receiving median payments of $1,752,573 compared to $24,387 for female physicians. Additionally, even among OBGYN physicians, male physicians received higher payments than female physicians ($87,596 compared to $31,166).
For all academic ranks, male physicians received higher median payments than female physicians did. By way of example, male physician professors received median payments of $129,499 compared to $19,559 for female physician professors.
The study authors wrote, “We looked at all medical fields, including but not limited to surgery, radiology, pathology, dermatology, internal medicine, and obstetrics and gynecology and found that men earned significantly more than women regardless of their medical specialty. Obstetrics and gynecology is a female-dominated specialty of which women [comprise] more than 60% of all physicians. Our study showed that 52 of the physicians receiving industry payments were from obstetrics and gynecology: 31 women and 21 men. Despite a higher female-to-male ratio, male obstetricians and gynecologists received 3 times the amount of payment compensation from industry.”
The authors concluded that male physicians received significantly higher payments from the highest-grossing medical industry companies compared with female physicians and the disparity persisted across all medical specialties and academic ranks.
However, it is possible that the reason for the disparity is that, as seen in the chart below, males tend to dominate surgical specialties in the United States.
It will be interesting to see if the gap continues to widen, or if the biases that might be present amongst physicians, companies, and patients will slowly begin to erode.