Why Female Primary Care Docs Get Paid Less than Their Male Colleagues

It’s a symptom of the broken way we pay for medical care.

In the United States, women make less money than men in similar jobs. This is a fact that is really not contested. What is contested, though, is why. Because there’s more to a job than the title.

We aren’t going to untangle the systemic differences in gender pay writ large today, but we can take a pretty deep dive into the discrepancy seen among primary care docs thanks to this study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

This is a pretty special analysis, thanks to a level of granular detail that I’ve really never seen before when people have tried to dig into these questions.

Researchers led by Dr. Ishani Ganguli at Harvard extracted data from Athenahealth, an electronic health record provider.

In total, they pulled over 24 million primary care visits involving more than 8 million…