female doctor[/caption]Leanne Jenkins---“Females are playing an increasingly large role in the overall physician workforce, and because of that we expected that any gaps that may have existed in the 1980s would have closed by now. But what we found is that the gap is essentially the same.”
Anumpam B. Jena, M.D. PhD, co-authored a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and responded to the results by underlining how the gap in wages between men and women has not closed.
Research conducted by Jena and colleagues found that betweeen 1987 – 1990 male physicians earned $33,840 or 20% more than female physicians on an annual basis. Between 2006 – 2010 that gap increased to $56,019 or 25.3%
A recent article in Medical Economics relates a study showing women physicians to earn $56,000 less annually than male physicians. Gender equality has still not been achieved in the United States.
The results are particularly surprising given the fact that 50% of medical school graduates are women.
Commonplace points out the myth of gender equality by observing women may be 50% of the workforce but the wage gap continues to show that full equality has not been achieved. Whereas some media, like Time magazine in 2012, underlines the fact women as a group have overtaken men as breadwinners, when it comes to actual earnings women have yet to achieve the wages of men in almost every professional group.
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Leanne Jenkins writes about female gender issues, a favorite topic specifically related to employment and equality and has written about these issues since the 1960's. . She is a graduate of sociology and has maintained a strong interest in this area since graduating from college at a time when it was harder for women to get jobs in almost every profession, she says.