The insidious, fascinating, and utterly infuriating reason that women’s health care is worse than men’s
In the moody alcoves of a lobby bar in Chicago in 2021 over French 75s, Dr. Louise King, a gynecologic surgeon, and Katie L. Watson, a bioethics professor, found themselves in conversation about a topic that had long frustrated them both: Female surgeons are consistently underpaid compared to male surgeons, even after accounting for specialty, rank, age, and other factors. What troubled them even more was how the pay gap compounded in King’s own field. Surgeons who perform procedures that are specifically for women, like gynecological surgeries, are paid less for their services than surgeons who perform comparable surgeries for the male anatomy. Gynecologic surgeons are also predominantly women. Over the course of the conversation, Watson termed this situation “double discrimination,” a phrase that captures the overlapping dilemma of lower pay for surgeries in a specialty that is overwhelmingly female and also serves a primarily female patient population. Key takeaways Doctors are paid less for gynecologic surgeries than for similar surgeries on men. That pay gap has barely improved in the last 20 years. The value of each procedure is largely set by a committee of doctors that relies on self-reported, and sometimes inaccurate, surveys in which doctors report the skill and time their...
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