What does this mean? The averaged all doctors by race? They averaged by profession and race then combined to form some sort of weighted average by race?
"White/Caucasian physicians earn the most ($303,000), followed by those who are Asian ($283,000), Hispanic ($271,000), and black/African American ($262,000).
The gap can be partly explained by participation in primary care, which pays less. Of the four groups, black/African American doctors are most likely (30%) and white doctors least likely (20%) to be PCPs, the survey found."
They continue:
"A 2016 studyin BMJ[12] found an even wider gap than the new Medscape report in payment levels for black doctors. White male physicians in the United States earned as much as 35% more than black physicians, even after accounting for specialty, experience, number of hours worked, number of Medicaid patients, and whether the physician is a PCP, the study found."
I can't find the BJM report. The phrase "earned as much as 35% more" is odd. Is this some maximum out of all the professions considered? a single doctor who earned more? The maximum seems like an odd number to report without reporting the average. Is there some reason they want to exaggerate the difference? It irks me.
edit: I suspect another large factor they did not consider is location of practice. We should only compare doctors that practice in the same location. Location plays a big influence on the wealth of your customers, and therefore how much you are paid.
Though I'm sure bias has a part in the income disparity, I suspect it is less so, relative to other professions, as the fees paid to doctors for each procedure are broadly standardized. Individual doctors' choices of where to practice and what kind of patients to serve may play a larger role. (IMHO, this is a much better justification for affirmative-action programs than other oft-cited justifications.)
It seems like the medical profession would actually have an easier path to pay fairness than other industries, because clinical revenue is so easy to measure. (As opposed to other fields where the financial value of an employee's work is more difficult to measure.)
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...