Cover: Female Physicians Earn An Estimated $2 Million Less Than Male Physicians Over A Simulated 40-Year Career

Female Physicians Earn An Estimated $2 Million Less Than Male Physicians Over A Simulated 40-Year Career

Published in: Health Affairs, Volume 40, No. 12, pages 1856–1864 (December 2021). doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2021.00461

Posted on RAND.org on December 10, 2021

by Christopher M. Whaley, Tina Koo, Vineet M. Arora, Ishani Ganguli, Nate Gross, Anupam B. Jena

Over a simulated forty-year career, male physicians earned an average adjusted gross income of $8,307,327 compared with an average of $6,263,446 for female physicians—an absolute adjusted difference of $2,043,881 and relative difference of 24.6 percent. Gender differences in career earnings were largest for surgical specialists ($2.5 million difference), followed by nonsurgical specialists ($1.6 million difference) and primary care physicians ($0.9 million difference).

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