The Gender Wage Gap in Medicine : An empirical study on the gender wage gap among physicians in Norway

Abstract

This master thesis studies the gender wage gap among physicians in Norway in 2019. Further, we explore the gender wage gap using a fixed-wage variable to isolate the effect overtime pay has on the gender wage gap. We also studied the gender wage gap among medical specialists and general practitioners. Lastly, we studied the wage gap in 2009 to see how the pay gap has evolved. Our analyses are based on cross-sectional data from 2019 and 2009 obtained from Microdata.no. The results suggest that the unadjusted gender wage gap is 19,5% in 2019, despite the increase in the share of women in medicine. When controlling for age, sector, level of education, and counties, the adjusted gender wage gap in 2019 is still notable at 16,2%, with age used as a proxy for experience being the factor with the greatest effect. In addition, we observe that the unadjusted gender wage gap using the total wage variable is considerably larger than the fixed wage pay gap, which was 9,2%. We also find that the gender gap of fixed-wage is smaller for women working in the public sector than for women working private sector. We also observe that the unadjusted gender wage gap is 19,7% for general practitioners and 19,0% for medical specialists. The adjusted gender wage gap is 14,3% for general practitioners and 16,6% for medical specialists, suggesting that the larger gender wage gap among medical specialists might be attributed to women self-selecting into specific specializations to fulfill family duties or other preferences. Also, the results indicate that the gender wage gap is smaller for female medical specialists in the public sector than for those working in the private sector. We also found that the gender wage gap has diminished between 2009 and 2019. The main explanation for this development is that the age difference between men and women has evened out over time. We conclude that although the medical profession has characteristics that are associated with a smaller gender wage gap, such as greater substitutability among workers and thus a more linear wage structure, a notable gender wage gap persists as the medical profession requires overtime work, and there is a gendered difference in working overtime. Also, our result suggests that women self-selecting into specific specializations also contributes to why the gender wage gap persists.