The bad news is that a recent survey found there is no place in the U.S. where female doctors earn more than men. The good news is that it also found the gender wage gap is narrower in Dallas than in some other large metropolitan areas.
Doximity, an online directory of medical providers, asked about salary in a survey of more than 36,000 full-time, licensed physicians in 50 metro areas, including Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston.
Physicians in Dallas and Houston are among the best-paid in the nation, according to the results released Wednesday.
But the findings also demonstrate that narrowing the pay disparity between genders continues to be problematic. The “difference is stark,” Dr. Nate Gross, Doximity's co-founder, said in a news release.
Physicians who participated were from 20 specialties, including primary care, neurosurgery, pediatrics and plastic surgery. There was no medical specialty in which women earned more than their male counterparts.
Doctor salaries in four Texas cities
How much doctors are paid is influenced by many factors, including area of specialty, location of practice and level of experience.
Houston ranked fifth and Dallas-Fort Worth 10th on the list of large metro areas that had high average physician salaries across both gender and specialty, according to the Doximity survey.
Doctors in and around Houston had the highest average pay at $345,079, according to the results. In Dallas, the average salary was $339,911, San Antonio $322,574 and Austin $309,185.
Generally, average salaries nationwide were lower for women, but the wage gap was smaller in North Texas.
Gender differences in pay
Nationally, female physicians earned about $91,284 less (or 25 percent) on average than their male counterparts. The differences were lower in Dallas and higher in Houston.
On average, female doctors in Dallas and Austin earned about 23 percent and 24 percent less than their male counterparts, respectively. In San Antonio, female doctors earned about 25 percent less, and in Houston, about 29 percent less.
Of all the areas evaluated, the lowest wage gap was in Sacramento, Calif., where women earned about 19 percent less than men. The highest was in Charlotte, N.C., where there was a 33 percent difference in pay.
Doximity is not the first to highlight the issue in the medical field.
A 2016 study in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine found "significant sex" differences in pay among physicians with faculty appointments at 24 U.S. public medical schools, even after the researchers accounted for age, experience, specialty and faculty rank.
Of the 59,579 physicians practicing in Texas as of September, more than 19,500 were women. Experts worry that differences in pay that begin early in female physicians' careers continue to widen, and that women often feel less comfortable negotiating, especially at the start.
"They haven't had the training to feel comfortable in that role of asking for more," Dr. Suzanne Harrison, president of the American Medical Women's Association, said in an interview with the medical news site STAT. "This is unfortunately still a very real problem."
However, some anticipate the trend will begin to correct itself as more women graduate from medical school, especially in more high-income specialties like surgery.
Of the 1,471 students who graduated from medical schools in Texas in 2015, nearly half were women, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
There are still a large number of older male physicians in those roles, said Britt Berrett, a former hospital CEO who teaches Healthcare Management at the University of Texas at Dallas management school.
"There is no reason there should be a higher percentage of males other than it has been a cultural behavior in medicine. That's one factor you can't see in snapshot data," he said. "But hopefully we will continue to close the gap with the increase of females in the physician ranks."
